Thursday 19 July 2007

Facebook - not as innocent as it seems

A month or so ago I received an innocuous invite from a friend to "join me on Facebook", so I did, innocently and without any understanding of the future impact of my action.

After wasting many hours trying to get a purple rabbit called Gerald to win his fight against various monsters, posting pictures of Sheffield flood carnage, ignoring people trying to turn me into a vampire, zombie, pirate etc, and flinging food and drinks and flowers at my friends, I've realised Facebook is just one big playground of mindless yet addictive applications. This rather sweet poem from David Bogner says it all really...

Facebook has gargantuan time-sucking powers, but what's worse, much worse, is that Facebook is now being used by employers to assess the potential suitability of job applicants. Mike Gotta points out that if information concerning protected characteristics (e.g., race, gender, or age) is disclosed and those being assessed by employers are not hired, they may find themselves on the wrong end of discrimination claims. David Lacey warns that employers might have grounds to demand ownership of their employees’ social networking information.

This is bad, as any prospective employer looking at my Facebook profile would think I was a mindless numpty with too much time on their hands and alot of mad friends who like to take pictures of people blowing rasberries (pretty good actually, check this one out...)

So consider this when you're in the middle of a virtual food fight - someone somewhere may be checking you out...and dismissing you as an idiot...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed this post - you have linked to some excellent resources here! Facebook and social networking in general is a very interesting workplace topic, with the growth of LinkedIn and other web-based resources. Thanks for linking to us - and to that poem! It was great.