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Facebook is Not Your Private Bulletin Board
By Julie | January 29, 2008
The current big trendy thing in the Twin Cities is for high schools to find Facebook-posted pictures of their students drinking.
This gets right down to the heart of something I told some college students for a career day a while back: Do not assume your Facebook profile is secret. Not from your parents, not from potential employers, not from other figures of possible authority. I stressed that one should never post things to Facebook you don’t want a potential employer to discover. Just as you Google the hot member of the appropriate affectional gender after a introduction or blind date, don’t assume employers don’t do the same for you - especially if you’re applying in online marketing! Your online presence becomes a part of your personal ‘brand.’
Every time this happens though, the high school students get upset about invasions of privacy and how ‘maybe the images were photoshopped!’ uh-huh. The parents also frequently get peevish about the schools ‘usurping’ parental authority by doing such things as suspending athletes from sports (most HS athletes sign a ‘no substances’ policy).
Common sense applies to all: The Internet is basically public. Don’t count on it for privacy when posting images or various forms of personally identifiable information. For the stuff that SHOULD be private, like banking, deal with respected providers. And don’t be dumb.
(And now, all of us old farts over 30 can breathe a sigh of relief that if we did have pictures online in the early flush of Mosaic 1.0 and the magnificent speed of the 38.8k modem, they’re long, long gone, or were under such obscure nom-de-guerres no one could find ‘em anyway.)
Topics: dunce hat, education, google, marketing, minneapolis, online branding, privacy, snowflakes, social media, the road to hell, user generated content, web 2.0 |
September 11th, 2008 at 10:07 am
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