Students: Leave last night's kegger offline

April 21, 2008 —

A PUBLIC MATTER -

Students should not post pictures of themselves getting hammered on Facebook. It's really as simple as that. Ever since Facebook went public, companies are screening profiles of applicants and coming to a realization that the well-dressed individual at the interview is not the same person in the profile.

That's not to say that what employers are doing is right. A person's experience, education, and intelligence should be the only determinants in the application process.

But common sense tells us that any hiring manager in his or her right mind is going to look up an applicant's Facebook profile to check for undesirable habits, like sexual promiscuity, drug use, compulsive gambling, alcoholism, and bad grammar.

Civil liberties groups have been scrapping in courts with employers over whether or not information in a Facebook profile is legally private. And the legality of the issue is important. But a ruling isn't likely to affect anyone in the short-term. What could affect people in the short term are the photo albums of keg stands and beer bongs, and the pictures of you and your roommates dressed in ... relaxed attire.

The bigger issue at work here is the nature of information that at one point was regarded as "private." What you did last night didn't used to be anyone's business unless you made it their business. But when you post a photo online, it's everyone's business. Privacy is a delicate issue on the Internet, and one that's still not entirely sorted out.

For example, just try deleting your Facebook account. It's next to impossible. You can deactivate your account, sure, but Facebook still keeps a record of everything you've done on the site.

Facebook says the only way to completely eliminate your presence on the site is to manually delete everything you've done: every message, wall post, friend request, uploaded photo, added application, and so forth. Everything must go. Only then, after deactivating your account, will your information cease to exist on their servers.

Again, the legality of such practices isn't entirely clear. What is clear is that, in signing up for the service, you essentially waive your right to all sorts of privacy, both legally and practically.

A couple pieces of advice are circulating on networking sites, and they're particularly germane: Don't put something on your profile that you wouldn't tell your grandmother. And think of what you post on Facebook as a tattoo: Sure, it looks cool, it lets all the girls/boys know what bands you're into, and it can draw the attention that you crave. But some of that attention is not the type of attention you want. And tattoos are very hard to remove. On most people, they are permanent fixtures.

Do you want the lasting image that an employer gets of you to be a picture of you wearing a hoola-hoop - and nothing else?

Like it or not, the purposes of Facebook and of social networking sites in generally are starting to expand. Facebook still fulfills its primary purpose - to provide entertainment to young people in the many forms that such entertainment takes. But it's taken on a secondary role. It's no longer a club for younger people to share tales of debauchery: It's a hiring tool. So be careful. Those few hundred pixels could cost you an internship.