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Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

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Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#61

Post by gaius »

pgroves wrote: post #6

I don't think this scenario could play out that way. - Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature. - The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollar…

- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends

Doesn't matter if they are still accessible to FB themselves tho'!

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#62

Post by hooande »

Facebook appears to be immune from privacy concerns. No matter what they do, the average person will keep using it. So what's to stop facebook from offering a "Narrative Data" style service of their own?

If facebook said, "we're going to show potential employers and insurers a report based on your activity" do you think that would be enough to get people to delete their accounts? The average college student isn't going to significantly change their behavior because of a hypothetical job offer in a vague future. Most of the people they know will also be posting party pics and talking about health issues...they aren't doing anything wrong.

As other comments have pointed out, no one is perfect. Everyone has something they don't want people to know, and most of those things aren't a big deal. Even if facebook prepared and sold general reports about everyone's activity, I don't think it would cause enough harm to get people to stop using it.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#63

Post by plorkyeran »

mikeash wrote: post #40
DigitalJack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as they don't put it in writing, there would be no case. People are not hired or fired for illegal reasons all the time. You just don't state those reasons. If it is due to blatantly obvious handicaps, that's a different story. But good luck proving you we're passed over because the employer figured out you have headaches.

Individual instances can be difficult to prove, but a systematic effort to discriminate based on these things should not be hard to detect within a decently sized company.

Especially given this hypothetical super data miner. If companies can use Narrative Data to avoid hiring people who suffer from migraines, then it should be even easier to use Narrative Data to show that they're intentionally doing so.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#64

Post by drumdance »

dredmorbius wrote: post #55
drumdance wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think it will go the other way. Things that are suspect now will be treated as youthful indiscretion. Think about it: the current President admitted in his own book that he had done cocaine. That was unthinkable just 10 years ago. As Gen Y moves higher up the career ladder, they'll be the ones making the hiring decisions about the Facebook oversharers.

Your example provides its own counterexample. The same individual has encountered persistent questioning over the specifics of his birthplace, despite ample documentation substantiating his claims. How information is interpreted depends very much on who's interpreting it and what their objectives are. Hiring processes are notoriously opaque. Corporations are, very literally, machines for creating one-way flows of lia…

Perhaps, but it's hard to imagine private-citizen Obama not getting hired because of his birth certificate.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#65

Post by rayiner »

michaelochurch wrote: post #14

LinkedIn scares me more, because I think most 22-year-olds don't really foresee that they might have the need to change their career histories. The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22. I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn p…

> I also don't think anyone with data mining talent is going to work for health insurance companies doing intrusive cross-site work for less than a million per year (we're talking about work that isn't just unpleasant or boring but actually evil)

Dude. Top people will do work like that for far less. See, e.g., the defense industry, the coal mining industry, etc. And with billions at stake, the insurance companies will pay.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#67

Post by alid »

drumdance wrote: post #51
dredmorbius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is among the reasons I've revised my LinkedIn profile to a de minimas version. Name. Field. No job history. No resume. Contacts, which I keep trimmed in public views (lord knows how they're available behind my back, of course). I also maintain no FB profile. My prediction: the "social web" will end very badly. Mostly as the present cohort hits its 30s and early 40s, with concomitant life issues (marriage, child…

I actually think it will go the other way. Things that are suspect now will be treated as youthful indiscretion. Think about it: the current President admitted in his own book that he had done cocaine. That was unthinkable just 10 years ago. As Gen Y moves higher up the career ladder, they'll be the ones making the hiring decisions about the Facebook oversharers.

I agree - life is becoming more transparent, but this is corresponding with a collective growth in our emotional intelligence, so hopefully as we share more we're also more empathetic to the human condition. We none of us are perfect. The article raises important points about the legacy of our digital footprint…but I'm not sure how self-censored I'd like to see the online world. If we were all too scared of the ramifications from sharing our thoughts and experiences online I'd miss the rich tapestry of debate and opinions!

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#68

Post by KeliNorth »

michaelochurch wrote: post #26
tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. Meanwhile, we talk to lots of great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles; it is by no means a standard requirement. If you can't be honest to LinkedIn, just keep your profile off it. No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm, so this health insurance story a…

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is…

Even if it was ethically okay, it's more likely to get you rejected for the job than hired, regardless of the lie. Why? HR isn't doing the checking. I did background checks for years at a major company. Our clients were both big and miniscule - you'd be surprised at how many very small business would be able to afford a reasonably priced non-subscription background screening service. If the degree was off by some years, the client wouldn't hire the person because they lied on their resume. It doesn't matter what the lie is, just that they lied, end of story.

Don't lie on resumes. It's not HR that'll be catching them. It'll be a company that's been instructed to just report back to the client with whether things were true or not. And we caught a lot of both innocent mistakes (off by 1 year or so), as well as outright fabrications.

There's no trying to explain that stuff to HR when you're simply sent a rejection letter by a third-party.

Also, some of our clients were required by the government to account for where they've been for the past 5 or 10 years, and requiring paperwork proving where they were (even if unemployed) for any gaps in those employment. People were embarrassed to admit when they were unemployed and so left it unexplained... again costing them a job. Yes the paperwork explained to them beforehand they had to explain it.

And yes, we'd catch the "small stuff" - calling up a training school to verify someone had gone, and then double-checking government databases to verify the school itself was legitimate, running names and credit checks... and telling people "we don't want to hear your explanation for why your resume is inconsistent. Send us paperwork proving it, and then we'll find out on our own if that paperwork is valid" is all a liar would hear.

I do have to admit catching people in innocent mistakes was heartbreaking, and I'm glad I got out before they started offering the social network checking services. But to say someone's so experienced with lying they think they won't get caught... just means they haven't applied with a company that has a good service provider in the background.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#70

Post by tptacek »

Apocryphon wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone. Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

I think the concern here is that people would edit the year they would graduate in order to escape being excluded because of ageism, a trend which Silicon Valley is notorious for.

So it's better to be a liar? No it isn't.
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