Sunday, June 13, 2010
HAUNTED BY A REPUTATION THAT’S ETERNAL ON THE WEB
By JOHN M. ANNESE
One program can find your phone number if you’ve ever posted it to a public Facebook group.
Another can mine posts to social networks like Twitter and Foursquare to determine if you’re home or out. Still another uses your activity on Twitter to guess what time you go to sleep.
And that’s just the tip of the privacy iceberg — years down the road, that photo on Facebook with two vodka bottles in your mouth, or that comment on someone else’s blog making an allegation about your sex life, might end up on the desk of a potential employer, or on the front page of a newspaper.
As users on Facebook.com continue to deal with the site’s rapidly-shifting privacy policies, online reputation has become a top concern among Internet users and members of social networking site.
Staten Island has seen a plethora of examples of online over-sharing gone awry over the years — a criminal court judge transferred to Manhattan, in part, because of his activity on Facebook; a high school student arrested after joking on YouTube about taking a hit out on his math teacher, and countless defendants in criminal cases whose public photos on social networking sites have made their way into the pages of the Advance.
Regarding the high school student, anyone interested enough to search his name on Google is directed to dozens of links to news stories about his 2007 arrest, even though the offending video has long since been deleted from YouTube.
A NEW INDUSTRY
A Google search of the phrase “online reputation” pulls up ads for nearly a dozen companies offering to “protect your online reputation” or “neutralize negative information.”
And last week, a study by the Pew Research Center showed more adult Internet users are keeping track of their reputations online than in years past, with young adults aged 18 to 29 more likely than older adults to take steps to protect themselves.
Specifically, 44 percent of users in that age bracket say they limit the amount of information about them publicly, while 71 percent of social networking users from that age brackets are changing their privacy settings to limit information. Almost half of that group , 47 percent, say they delete unwanted comments made by others on their profile, and 41 percent say they’ve removed their names from photographs.
“Most people don’t know that a huge business has developed over the last couple of years called ‘social media monitoring,’” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group. “You’re more than an open book. Your life lies digitally naked in front of several invisible onlookers.”
In one instance, he said, a Boston landlord rejected a potential renter because of raucous photos that appeared on the applicant’s Facebook page. And advertisers regularly study social networking activities to market to individual users, he said.
RAISING AWARENESS
On Staten Island, administrators at Wagner College and St. John’s University told the Advance this week they offer orientation classes warning students that online over-sharing might damage their future careers, while the College of Staten Island has run awareness campaigns warning students that future employers can check them out online.
Wagner and St. John’s administrators both said they don’t use social networking sites like Facebook to weed out potential applicants to the school, though.
“We don’t Google them. We don’t go on Facebook and search them. We have about 3,000 applications a year,” said Jake Browne, Wagner’s director of recruitment. With six people reviewing all of those applicants, Browne said, admissions staff don’t have the time to search each prospective students online profile, looking for embarrassing photos or damaging blog posts.
“We really try to take whatever’s in the application at face value,” Browne said.
