(Get) Outta My Facebook!

Teachers Disciplined Over Facebook Comments

Teachers are not held to the same standards as other professionals. Since they are the ones who are in a position of authority and trust, their morals and ethics are put under much more scrutiny, especially since they are the ones who are teaching our children.

The lines get a little bit blurred now when it comes to privacy and propriety, especially when it concerns Facebook and other social networks. Is it appropriate for a high school teacher to be seen holding a beer at a social function? Is it okay if we see images of an elementary school teacher smoking with her friends? The levels of professionalism that we hold to these educators are much more stringent than other business individuals or workers in most other industries. It can be a gray area when it comes to understanding what is appropriate to publish on Facebook and what can be deemed inappropriate and subject to disciplinary action by school board officials.

But because of these circumstances, teachers should also be much smarter than everyone else, and should be self-censoring their own content, especially when it is fairly obvious that questionable images and comments will most certainly be made public. In one example, teachers of a Charlotte high school were disciplined for posting objectionable content and images on their Facebook profiles. Several teachers in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district were facing disciplinary action for posting such comments as “teaching in the most ghetto school in Charlotte”,  racial slurs, and posing in provocative poses.

When are people (including teachers) going to realize that Facebook is an open door, and that publishing this type of material on their Facebok profiles, their Twitter pages, or their personal blogs is just going to cause trouble? People need to remember that there really is no invasion of privacy when they freely post their content to public Internet websites such as Facebook. If teachers can’t understand these simple principles of information flow, then what does it say about our education systems???

While it might be natural to boast to your buddies about how drunk you got at the Halloween party, you might want to keep the particulars of that drunken night of costume madness off of your Facebook profile, and be sure to advise your friends to keep you out of those published photo albums, because all it takes is one compromising image of you with that tipsy girl in the kittten costume to cost you your career.

While you might think it okay to spend a Saturday night partying it up, the company you work for has an image to maintain, and inappropriate shenanigans by their top salesman could damage sales and business reputations.

And even if your boss is okay with your social activities, your friends’ employers might not have the same attitudes, and those wacky drunken pictures could lead to a dismissal. After all, you’re sharing your private life on the Internet, you know that wide-open-to-everyone-in-the-world network thingy.

And let’s remember that business recruiters are very active in social networks, digging up dirt, and doing their due diligence when looking for suitable personnel to hire (or fire). Yes, they look for references, but there’s nothing more revealing than websites full of party stories, trysts, pranks, and stunts.

If you’re okay with the world hearing about every social situationn where you toss back a few beers, then by all means, fill your Facebook profile with drunken, blurred photos of you and your drinking buddies. But try and use some judgement when you decide to share questionable photos or stories of your other friends who might be more concerned about keeping their jobs.

You don’t need to look very hard to find horror stories about Facebook identity theft. We already know how vulnverable your personal information can be, especially if it’s posted openly on your freely available profile page. It doesn’t take much for a poacher to put two and two together to get enough details (including your birthday) about you to use to apply for credit.

And it doesn’t even need to be a big credit purchase, or a fraudulent VISA or Mastercard. It’s fairly easy for a crook to assimilate your ID, and use it to rent movies from the video store, or sign out books from the library. While you might not be liable for anything charged against you or applied against your accounts, the inconvenience alone is enough to cause you a headache.

Again, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to lock your Facebook profile so that only “trusted” friends can view your details. Even better, only put limited information in your account at all, so that poaching fraudsters can’t obtain enough information about you to use to create bogus credit cards, credit accounts, and other forms of identity theft.

It’s like parking your car at the mall. You know the thieves are out there and that they’re going to break into someone’s vehicle. The key is to make your vehicle look less attractive to steal than the other vehicles. While it’s likely going to be impossible to prevent someone from stealing information through Facebook, if your information is difficult to find, then they’ll just look somewhere else.