what do you think about schools/teams/employers looking at facebook?

[Dreeza]

I've heard horror stories about grad schools/sports teams/future employers using facebook to screen applicants, and personally, i think it is BS.

I'm getting a little frustrated with it, cause i just kinda got rudely spoken to by someone demanding i remove pics i posted of them because they are drunk in them, and they are trying to get into med school.

The thing is, on facebook, you can 'tag' someone in a picture, and when the pic is tagged, it is connected to your profile...but you can untag any pic that anyone has posted of you, and once the pic is untagged, it kinda gets lost to anyone who isn't your 'friend' on facebook (actually, more like the friend of the person who posted the pic)


Now obviously i respect the person's wishes, but its just annoying cause there is NO FREAKING WAY a med school would be able to see this pic...i mean, the process that they would have to go through would be absolutely ridiculous, and pretty much impossible because of privacy settings and what not.

Also, i have plenty of drunk pics of myself, still tagged, and clearly, i don't give a crap. I am 21. Why should my getting drunk on the weekend affect my admittance to grad school? Also, how can they even *prove* i am drunk in the pics? i mean, there are some pics of me where i could see where someone might assume i am drunk, but i havent even had a drop to drink...so i mean, what the heck.

I guess the only thing i can understand is sports teams, because they often have actual rules that say the members cannot drink...so thats ok.

But i dunno, i mean, there is a picture of me taking a shot with an extremely well respected, well known heart surgeon. Right before we took this shot, he was telling us how in college he was known around campus for his beer chugging skills. Clearly that did not affect his career path...i mean, the man still regularly gets drunk at parties and what not.

If you were on a acceptance committee would you really rule someone out as an applicant cause they had pics posted of themselves at parties??? I know I wouldn't. Its college. As long as it isn't affecting their school, i cant see why it should lessen the person's chances of getting in.

 

[GlassOnion]

Also, i have plenty of drunk pics of myself, still tagged, and clearly, i don't give a crap. I am 21. Why should my getting drunk on the weekend affect my admittance to grad school?

It shouldn't, but it does.

Personally I wouldn't screen but that's the view of a 20 year old, not a 50 year old who's been staring at applications all day.

But yes there's been a ton of stories of people who've been rejected in such a form. It does happen unfortunately and you should probably untag those images just in case. It would suck to blow your chances just because some admissions person wanted to be an ass.


Think of it as changing your answering machine message from your awesome rendition of More Than a Feeling's guitar solo to "hi this is <name> leave a message" or creating a new, more 'professional' e-mail account. Stuff along those lines.

 

[Psyfalcon]

Its something the world is just going to have to get over. All the people who are raising a fuss probably did the same thing. They just didn't have digital cameras to record it all.

See, I don't see it that way GO. Employers and such should generally stay out of someones personal life. It might not be all that "private" being on the internet, but unless it was done at, or regarding work they should stay out.

The email, or the phone number is something you give to an employer to contact you. Not something they are stalking you with.

 

[yoko]

i personally don't care. i have maybe one where i have a beer. i don't put up lewd pics. i don't party a lot and anyone who looks it over can tell that. i can understand MAYBE ifthe person seems to have some problem. but it would have to be kind of excessive. i don't condone it but really... like you said if they went throughall they needed to to see those pics then the person kind of deserves it for being dumb and allowing them as a friend lol. don't do things you might have to hide and if you do don't flaunt it simple asthat

 

[Georgygirl]

I think, once you post something on the internet, don't expect it to be private. It's free game. Does that kinda suck, yeah, but we all have to grow up sometime. Doesn't mean you can't do crazy stuff and take pics. Just don't post them up on such a public place.

 

[Lilavati]

I think, once you post something on the internet, don't expect it to be private. It's free game. Does that kinda suck, yeah, but we all have to grow up sometime. Doesn't mean you can't do crazy stuff and take pics. Just don't post them up on such a public place.

Nothing on the internet is secret. I may not approve of employers and such looking at facebook, but they can, and thus, they will. In a world where the behavior of an employee can get you sued, its probably not irrational on their part, though it is still objectionable. Googling people is already a long standing tradition. You can resent it all you like, and with justifaction, but they are going to do it anyway. People need to learn that nothing on the web is secret. Nothing you put in e-mail is secret. None of this stuff goes away . . . ever. There's always a copy, always a mirror.

 

[Dreeza]

I understand that it becomes public info, but my pics are ONLY viewable by the people I designate as 'friends' on the facebook. Clearly there are ways for people to see them without being my friend, but i'm just saying the chances are like 1 in a million that the school is actually able to come across them without extensive effort on their part.

Also, I don't have pics of anything that bad, i mean, when i am drunk i don't do anything I regret. The worst thing I do is talk obnoxiously loud and draw unnecessary attn to myself because of it, but I do that sober too, and its just cause something is wrong with my hearing, and I can't hear myself talking...

I'm not untagging them, not because I cannot understand how it looks bad, (cause I def can see that in some eyes of some uptight admissions person) but because they aren't *public* per se and the chances of them seeing it isn't worth the effort.

 

[Boemy]

Unfortunately a lot of employers do screen using MySpace, Facebook, etc. I can understand someone not wanting a picture of them drunk on the Internet . . . What if one of your other friends saves the picture and then posts it somewhere else? It's hard to keep things truly secret on the Internet.

 

[ToscasMom]

I'm going to jump in here because this topic is something I have some experience with both from employee and employer positions.

Look at it this way. (Please note that I am using the term "You" in the generic here). If you can post personal information about yourself for a couple of million of your "best friends" on the internet, you can post it for your next employer as well. That is not an invasion of your privacy. Public information is not private when it comes to employment or any other domain where background checking is the norm. That can include graduate schools as well. Facebook and pretty much any other domain on the internet is not private. It never was and it never will be.

If you have aspirations in the direction of a professional career where character matters, you need to know that background checks will be done on you. Your credit rating will be checked. Your criminal history will be checked. If you have a DWI in your life, it will be found. If you uncerimoniously quit your last two jobs, they will know. If you are behind in that child support, they will know. When you go for a position in a company, that company expects to know if you are any kind of risk to them before they hire you. This is not anything new, but the volume of information out there on us has gotten a lot bigger since the inception of the internet. This is one of the reasons I have mentioned that you should be careful what you put about yourself on the internet. (The other reason of course is there are plenty of unstable people on the net and letting them know who you are and where you live is a sure way for one of them to latch onto you in one form or another.)

It is NOT an invasion of your privacy for an employer to do checks on who you are. I even do them for potential renters. I want to know if you have the ability to pay the rent. I want to know if you were evicted last time and why. I want to know if you got arrested recently and for what, and it is all public information and perfectly legal.

Public information is NOT an invasion of privacy. We all have a trail that we have left behind wherever we go. The older we get, the longer our tracks get. If we have something to hide along that trail then we can expect it to one day possibly come back and bite us. Corporations are not democracies and never will be. Nor are med schools or law schools or a host of other institutions I am not even mentioning. If you one day want a really good paying job with a company that is involved in any way with military or government contracts, even if you are not going to personally work on those contracts, every detail of your life will be scrutinized. When I had to get clearance to access projects in the aerospace industry, they not only checked into every facet of my life to that point, but DISCO (Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office) knocked on the doors of neighbors I had on every single street I ever lived on and asked them about me.

The world of employment is a world of Finding Out Who You Are beyond that application you fill out. If you lie on an application they will want to know. It goes to character. If you have creditors chasing after you, you are a risk to the company (Imagine for example if you are applying for an accountant position). If you have a criminal background it goes to character and you are considered a risk. If you traveled to strange places regularly it is a red flag. All of your life, things that you do that are youthful indiscretions, and I use that term loosely, are subject to investigation.

Facebook is just one small part of who you are (you generic), but if who you are on facebook is not who you want to look like you are to an employer, it is very very wise to think about these things for posterity. Because if you want to be hired for that fantastic job you have dreamed all your life about, there IS no such thing as your privacy before the ink is dry on that job offer letter. It's just the way it is and it is very wise to know that as early on in life as possible.

The internet is a very strange place full of friends you don't even really know. So yes, I would think twice before I posted that groping photo of me and my last boyfriend sharing a joint so that a couple of million of my best friends on the net might see it-- because one day I might find it has been attached to an email and it has traveled all around the world, including to the computer screen of my employer.

Don't get angry with my message. I'm just the messenger. This is the reality of the world of work, the world of serious higher education, and life in general. Just some food for thought. If it keeps anyone from finding a door slammed twenty years from now, then I am glad. And twenty years comes around a lot faster than any of us would like to imagine it does. What we do an who we are along the way can and often does matter.

 

[Baxter'smybaby]

Well, I was going to make a wise and informative post....but then read TM's. Pretty much she has said (more eloquently than I ) what I was thinking--how we present ourselves in all areas of our lives follows us...it is a fact of life. At 21, you may not see what is down the road, and why you may not want all those photos out there in cyberspace.

 

[ToscasMom]

I also do want to add that nothing is every really deleted on the internet. There is some great software out there, some of it free, that can pull up old caches from sites. One that comes to mind right now is Wayback, the internet archive. It's accessible to anybody who wants to use it. Free.

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Most companies pay a yearly membership fee to companies who do their investigations for them. Armed with your social security number, which you are required to divulge to employers, the sky is the limit.

 

[mjb]

This thread makes me think of my college-age children. One of them needs to read this thread!!!! I haven't seen his facebook page (and I don't think I want to). His sister occasionally tells me things. Nothing bad. Just stuff like she's foudn out through there that he's no longer dating his girlf friend, etc.

I'm afraid he doesn't think very far ahead when he's doing things right now, though.

 

[Dreeza]

Don't get angry with my message. I'm just the messenger. This is the reality of the world of work, the world of serious higher education, and life in general. Just some food for thought. If it keeps anyone from finding a door slammed twenty years from now, then I am glad. And twenty years comes around a lot faster than any of us would like to imagine it does. What we do an who we are along the way can and often does matter.

thanks for your very informative post I'm not angry with the message at all.

However, I am still not going to take down my pics. Sure some of my friends might have reposted them somewhere with no privacy settings for their own personal use, but if they did, there is no way they would write my last name on the pic, so grad schools would have no way of finding it.

Now, if i actually smoked pot, i would NEVER post a pic of myself with a joint, cause that is illegal.

Consuming alcohol when I am over the age of 21 is not illegal. There is no pic of myself that is so bad that it would end up being one of those that gets sent around to millions of people.


I know i am getting a little huffy about this, but i am just so annoyed with the guy's comment to me, cause he was so rude about it...the picture of him he wanted taken down didnt even have alcohol in it. And while he was quite drunk at the time, the picture is actually a really cute one of him and his gf, and neither of them even look drunk...it was taken outside on a sunny day.

 

[Brattina88]

My boss asked me to search for a prospective employee for her on myspace one time. She figurered I knew how to work it, or I would be faster or something. I didn't really want to, but I did. And I was a little glad. I work at a Day Care, and there was 'ify' pictures on her myspace, and a blog about how she lost her sisters kid for nearly four hours, and another one where the child choked on a toy while in her care. I'm usually not one to judge, but yea - Sounds like an amazing day care employee to me! That scares me, actually