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Tag Archives: Privacy
Password Please
During many of our class discussions we talk about employer’s using items that we post on facebook or other social media sites to fire their employee’s or using the internet to find out things about prospective employee’s.
What about saving the time of entering a person’s name into a google search or any website that compile personal information such as http://pipl.com/, imagine your prospective employer asking you for your password and login information. This may sound unfathomable to many of us but according to the two article’s below this is exactly what happened to Robert Collins an employee of the Maryland Division of Corrections.
Mr. Collins was asked to give his login information for his facebook account while going through a re-certification processes. He had to sit as the interviewer logged in and read posts made by Mr.Collins as well as people he was friends with.
The case has now been taken up by the ACLU which states that this is a breach of the Federal Stored Communications Act and Maryland State law.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-password-please
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/11/02/should-employers-be-allowed-to-ask-for-your-facebook-login/71480#disqus_thread
Your Personal Life Isn’t Protected . . .
But your work life is! All workers rejoice! Maybe. Probably because the National Labor Review Board can get involved in this case (as opposed to Stacey Snyder who was still in the process of getting certified as a teacher and was still in school), Dawnmarie Souza’s wrongful firing lawsuit against American Medical Response came down in her favor this week. Souza was fired and denied union representation when she bad mouthed her boss with other colleagues on Facebook. As much as people discount the importance of unions in America, her denial of union representaiton was what brought her to the NLRB and probably what saved her. In the case of Stacey Snyder you have a student-teacher on her own at the whim of her school administration. Because Souza was able to argue that her firing was a violation of labor law, the NLRB, a relatively powerful government agency, took up her case. Aside from the issue of what kind of workers should be protected by the NLRB and other federal laws and just how much leeway teachers in training should have, the real sticking point here for me is that Souza’s speech was protected because it was directly work related. Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo was not protected because it was not work related. Work related speech, ostensibly”public” in that it effects a number of people, remains something that we are willing to protect. Private speech and the life we live outside of work, evidently, is something we don’t really think is worthy of protection In American labor law at-will employment means at-will firing and people should realize that what they think is private and not related to their work life actually has a way of becoming public enough to warrant their termination. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other social media ride the line between what we understand to be public and private, so much so that maybe we need to do away with these terms in defining types of communication. It should be no surprise that the legal system is struggling to understand the separation between the two when it comes to social media.
deleting Facebook accounts
In our last class, we talked about how Facebook affects us, some more than others in many different ways. For many, Facebook is an easy way to keep in contact with old friends, make new friends, take part in new activities and for some, killing time : ). This class in particular captured my attention because we focused on how the life we live and the life on Facebook are two totally and separate things. It’s basically, someone living in two different worlds. From chapter VI, it mentions that we tend to manage the impression we show to others with caution. We try to impress, play different roles, try to expose our lives to others and also in a way, to somewhat sell “ourselves”.
For some, after a while Facebook tends to be a pain and we try to remove it from our lives by deleting the account. In the past, it was a simple thing to do but as of recent, there are many different and complicated steps one must undergo in order as to do so. Lately, it was clear that there is no such thing as deleting the account, but instead, you are temporary putting your account on lock, until you log back in and then it will be reactivated in an instant. Also, for those who spent the time to remove their account, it is also obvious that there are many different websites that by simply typing in your name, one can find each and every account they have created on various websites. With this said and done, we all can say that removing personal information online, is not as easy as it looks or they said it would be.
Knowing Your Audience?
A Cautionary Tale: As we will read later in the semester, our social media presence is both a way for us to have an easier time keeping track of the world, but also a way for the world to have a much easier time keeping track of us. Stacey Snyder, the “drunken pirate” pictured above, is often cited as one of the first instances of social media usage actually ruining someone’s career. This article details Snyder’ s dismissal from a college student teaching program and the denial of her teaching certificate all due to her posting this picture with the caption “drunken pirate” to her Myspace profile. Snyder sued but her suit was eventually dismissed on the grounds that the post was not a matter of public concern and was therefore not a First Amendment issue. This incident brings up a number of issues relevant to our course (the difference between what is public and what is private being the most obvious), but I find Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction to be quite applicable to this particular situation. When presenting oneself in everyday online life, the ability to know, and therefore control in someone, one’s audience is increasing difficult. As Facebook’s privacy settings make more and more of our profiles “public” and anyone with internet access can google your name, the audience witnessing your online performance is undergoing exponential growth. The stages that we perform on are changing dramatically. Is it time to come start changing our performances as the audience gets bigger and bigger while acquiring greater and greater access to the our everyday lives? Or will the audience become more accustomed to witnessing what has traditionally been a part of what Goffman calls the backstage? Has it become impossible for us to know our audience while the audience itself knows us even better? What kind of defensive or protective practices are possible when we don’t even know who or what is watching us?
