21–30 of 71 posts
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account? (Actually I think I have three Twitter accounts, never used, and no idea what their names are.) Or might they believe me, and think I'm too odd-stream to rent their apartment or work in their office?
I have no twitter, no fb, no reddit, no g+, Github, and my account here is a throwaway which I regularly abandon and create a new one. I was never asked for any of this (well, except github on job applications in the past which never been a problem when I explain them I don't have one) and if in the future I am, I probably will drop the deal (whatever it is) on the spot.
I've sanitized all of my social media because, as a startup founder, the magnifying glass of "due diligence" is hovering over me at all times. The last thing I need is a problem because of something trivial. In fact, regarding twitter, my policy is to never use it except to link to other things or retweet someone else's post. Because a 140 character statement on a complex topic is a recipe for disaster.
I find it worrying that the only people who feel safe speaking publicly on so many issues are people who profit from controversy and people with nothing to lose.
Its like the old problem of how does an aristocracy keep itself in power? Well the expensive, crude, and unreliable method is lots of soldiers and aggressive top down force, but a more advanced, cheaper, reliable method is to propose two identical figurehead leaders with wildly varying PR campaigns and convince the public that selecting between the identical figureheads is the definition of freedom.
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
Edit: 26 years -> the entire time social media has existed, to please the pedantry.
Unfortunately supply and demand in a place like NY is such that people will probably have to put up with nonsense like this. In other areas there would probably be a market opportunity for landlords who are only going to focus on things that are actually relevant to whether someone is going to be a good tenant or not.
Who are you trying to filter out? Credit checks are likely already required so you already know their financial situation. If they're lying about anything critical, the contract likely already has that covered.
If anything, it's a tone-deaf sociopathic attempt to "get to know each other".
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
? Do you think people who are handing you the keys to at least 100k worth of property, with 2 months rent as a deposit if that, do not want to know who they're renting to?
The words "false dichotomy" come to my mind. By your logic landlords are just handing contracts out at random if they can't stalk you online.
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
Standard New York landlords who are leasing empty apartments as a business just run a credit check— they'd probably exposing themselves to problems under fair housing laws if they asked for much more.
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate? Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
As someone looking for an apartment in NYC right now, who has lived here for edit: the entire time social media has existed, this has never happened to me or anyone I know. I don't think it's a "thing," as the article implies. Edit: 26 years -> the entire time social media has existed, to please the pedantry.
I don't think that part matters too much considering social media in its current form wasn't really around for most of that time :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't like X unenforceable thing" is the mark of our generation. Every tweet is public, and if anyone thinks they've protected them somehow, that is both unlikely to be true in all cases and definitely is missing the point that making your tweets private is a different statement entirely. This isn't even anything new. We used to ask for references, and we'd follow up further if the stakes were high enough. I got i…
Except this kind of behaviour is very likely to be illegal in Germany. Sure, violation is hard to prove if it isn't blatant but this kind of regulation prevents the behaviour from becoming socially acceptable. Case in point: try asking an employee in Germany to give you a urine sample. There are very few jobs where a legal case can be made for mandatory drug testing and even fewer where the employer is allowed to rec…
Ostensibly, "revenge porn" dates back at least to some of Hustler's columns in the 1980s. The practice of spreading pornographic images without the model's consent is doubtlessly much older.
"Doxing" is simply leaking one's personal information over the Internet. It's not like public outings have never been done before, only the medium is different this time. Doxing but only leaking to a client is basically the entire job of a private investigator, since the 19th century.
Basic decency and common courtesy were lost long before us Millennials, I'm afraid.
The author writes, "Before I started looking for an apartment, I never gave much thought to the cumulative identity I had been presenting, or even performing, on the Internet. " This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an empl…