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Employers Shouldn’t Be Poking Around Your Facebook
There are a lot of questions surrounding the boundaries that employers or potential employers should have regarding your personal life, whether the information comes up during your employment, or during the hiring process. If you have nothing to hide, then that’s swell, but your Facebook speaks volumes that don’t appear on your job resume.
When an employer researches potential candidates, Google and other search engines are a powerful tool for finding out previous employment history or other character traits of job applicants. And Facebook is a pure resource for finding out anything and everything about a person’s past and present. Even Business Week writes about the dangers of Facebook, as it’s an open book for employers to find out more dirty details about people before they hire them.
Now having a Facebook profile open to your new boss might be a show of trust and honesty, those New Year’s party pictures could cost you that promotion!
OMG! That Is Like Totally Weak
There’s usually a pretty good reason to keep your pre-teen relatives outta your facebook. For example, my twelve-year-old niece recently added me as a friend, which I thought was harmless. However, after less than a day, I was receving an endless stream of messages from her and her tweenage friends, when she added me to an email list.
I was inundated with countless messages saying “Yah, like I know”, “totally whatever, that boy is a l0ser”, and “OMG! Do you really think he likes you?!!!”
After politely asking the girl (twice!) to remove me from the list, or at least not do a “reply to all” when she sends off her teen girl love gossip, without success, I decided to remove her from my list of friends entirely.
She’s not a bad girl, but there’s only so much teenage drama that I can accept in my inbox. So, in the future, we can stay in contact through email or in person, but she’s “outta my Facebook” until she’s at least mature enough to speak in “totally” complete sentences.
Let me preamble by saying that I’m not a Facebook enthusiast, although I do have an account. I work at home so I try and use my computer time as productively as possible. But when I get a few spare moments I try to answer messages that friends and family send me (don’t they have regular email???), because that’s just polite.
However a few moments turns into a few minutes, and then those few minutes turn into an hour. And what have I accomplished? I’ve deleted a number of oddball requests to join this group or that, I’ve removed mindless add-ons that my friends have “recommended” because they figure I need a virtual coffee, house plant, or magical Care Bear.
No I don’t mean to be rude (yes, I do), but my time is precious. I prefer to share it with my family and my friends…in person. Yes, I know I can’t spend quality time with my friends on the other side of the country, but my friends that live close have no excuse for being too busy when they’re spending all their free time answering 80’s era movie trivia questions, advocating the Save The Tribbles group, and superpoking their eyes out. Get a life people, and let me have mine back! 
My parents haven’t quite caught up to Facebook yet, and have barely made it past MSN, but more and more parents are spying on their children.
From Technology Online:
Parents who are desperate to find out what their children are up to in their spare time are joining networking websites aimed at teenagers.
Almost half of parents snoop around the sites that their children visit to check up on them, according to research. Parentline Plus, a helpline, says that calls from parents trying to keep tabs on their children’s internet activities are “regular and increasing”.
More about nosy Facebooking parents here…
No one can deny the impact that Facebook is having on the world. Millions of people have Facebook profiles, connecting friends and opening up their personal lives to the world. But this revolutionary social network can come with a price. When you reveal yourself in Facebook, you’re leaving privacy behind.
