Online Privacy Is Largely a Myth

The most unhip companies in America are wise to social media and employees better watch what they say on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Now, lawmakers in Germany are trying to put limits on the practice but it may be too late.

According to the New York Times, lawmakers are considering “placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting.” Public information on professional sites such as LinkedIn but would draw prohibit the use of  “purely social networking sites like Facebook.”  The law, which has the backing of the cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel, will be impossible to enforce and raises many difficult questions.

How is the government going to be able to tell if an employer is using improper information from Facebook?  Many people spill their most intimate secrets on more than one site.  What about someone who fails to set their security settings to prevent their profiles from being searched?   Are companies supposed to ignore information they find on Facebook about illegal activity such as drug use?

U.S. companies are establishing social media policies which workers are not going to like.  Many hospitals, for example, watch these sites to head off legal trouble because employees have put material online such as photographs that violate patient privacy laws.  Others have policies that prevent workers from bitching about work on the Web.  These restrictions are bound to become more restrictive as monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chief Executive Eric Schmidt recently proposed allowing young people the chance to erase their online identities of embarrassing information.  That is a pipe dream because employers will eventually figure out where to find what workers are trying so hard to hide

The lesson here is simple: don’t say anything online that you don’t want the entire world to read.

–Jonathan Berr