Just when you thought it was safe to tag yourself in a drunken picture with that beer funnel, the danger of having possible future employers eyeing your photos should make you think twice before clicking that “done tagging” button.
Fairfield alumnus Bill McBain’ 07 recently received an e-mail regarding this very issue from his boss at General Electric. The message warned employees of how dangerous tagged photos on Facebook, the popular social networking site, can be.
An intern at Anglo Irish Bank e-mailed his boss on Halloween explaining that “something had come up in New York” the next day and that he would not be able to come into work.
However, one of the intern’s co-workers found pictures of him at a party tagged in a Facebook photo album.
The intern later received a reply to his original e-mail about his upcoming absence. His employer said he was notified of the pictures and knew the real reason for his absence. The intern was busted big-time.
This e-mail, a sarcastic response from the boss, and the picture of the intern in a Tinkerbell costume (beer in hand) were plastered across the Internet and shown on CNN on Nov. 14.
According to an Oct. 26 survey on Careerbuilder.com, one in 10 companies reported using social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, to acquire personal information about employees.
An even greater one in four employers reported having used the Internet for the same purpose.
This is one of the main dangers of Facebook. While it is cool to be tagged in 758 pictures and have album titles of played-out Britney Spears songs, anyone who has a Facebook account must accept that it is a public domain and that other people will be able to access it.
The advancement of technology has finally collided with an individual’s innate desire to self-expose and intrude on the lives of peers, co-workers and fellow academics. All that is needed to do this is a valid e-mail address.
According to the terms of conditions on the Facebook Web site, users “agree not to use automated scripts to collect information from the Service or the Web site or for any other purpose.”
Unfortunately, employers adhere to this agreement about as much as pot heads pay attention to the national ban on marijuana.
Although no one says it, every college student knows that Facebook tells everything about one’s social life. Your popularity status is judged by your number of friends, your photos and the amount of notifications you receive on your birthday.
Having Facebook is a decision most college kids are forced into. Students who don’t have Facebook accounts are immediately set back in the race for social status and do not have the inside information to campus life compared to those who have Facebook.
In addition to its role as a social status manager, Facebook provides an outlet for nervous college students, giving them additional ways to meet, mingle and ‘poke’ their peers without ever coming face to face.
On the list of top phrases uttered by drunken college students is, “I know you from Facebook.”
Unfortunately, students must understand that content on Facebook is not limited to fellow college students. Just like many other things in life, Facebook must be used with caution, but it rarely is.
Just as Public Safety stated in a Mirror article last year that they didn’t use Facebook to find out about parties that may need to be broken up, employers will deny the fact that they search Facebook to check up on fresh interns playing hooky.
As Director of Public Safety Todd Pelazza said last year: “These sites are public domains. Once things are posted, they are there for the world to see.”
Be careful fellow Facebook users, because you can never be too sure just who is, and who isn’t, clicking on and browsing your profile page.
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