What Happens on Facebook Stays on Facebook

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score,” he says.
“What Your Klout Score Really Means,” by Seth Stevenson in Wired

I wonder if only a professional marketer would assume that using a proprietary algorithm designed to rate your social networking influence is a legitimate basis for a hiring decision. I fear the answer may be no, it’s not only marketers who make that assumption. As social networking becomes ever more central to most computer users’ online experience, “networked practices,” as danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison put it, “mirror, support, and alter known everyday practices, especially with respect to how people present (and hide) aspects of themselves and connect with others.” If this was true in 2007 (and I think it was), then it’s even more true today; in which case, Klout, or some social media competence-rater like it, could very well become the carrot and stick of typical professional-level job searches in the future.

“The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you,” wrote Lori Andrews in a New York Times editorial in February. “Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.” Andrews cites other examples of social networking coming back to bite the networker:

 Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Are Andrews’ privacy concerns (and mine) about social networking misplaced or overdone? Surely the hundreds of millions using these services worldwide are strong evidence that they provide some social good. They create spaces, for example, where people can (as boyd and Ellison put it) “articulate and make visible their social networks” across time and distance, and this is clearly what makes them so attractive to so many. Whether the connection is with close friends, lost friends, relatives, fans of a shared interest or business contacts, the point of these sites is connection, and, after all, connection is essential to our very social species.

Despite the strong tendency of people to congregate homogeneously, there is some evidence, as Jesse Washington notes in an article that otherwise reinforces the suspicion of a persistent digital divide among people of different races and ethnicities in the US, that at least some people’s online social circles are growing to include those they wouldn’t ordinarily associate with offline. Washington cites Anjuan Simmons, an African-American technology consultant who “has seen his social network expand. Only about half of his 2,834 Facebook friends are black, down from about 80% when he signed up in 2006.” Speaking for myself, a (sometimes) avid Twitter user for about a year now, my online social circle has become similarly much more diverse than my offline one, and this is unquestionably for the good. It is the time-and-space canceling nature of the internet that makes this network diversification possible, bringing people together where they are, at their desktops, laptops and mobile phones, rather than leaving it to them to expand their networks where they might never think to go offline.

But I think it’s easy to forget that there’s a major difference between online and offline socializing. Offline, we can socialize relatively privately in our own homes or even in public spaces where, ever more ubiquitous security cameras notwithstanding, our socializing doesn’t leave much of a trace. This is never true online. Even when our profiles are set to the most hermetic of privacy settings, our behavior is always in the sights of the host site. Not to say we’re always being watched. I doubt we are. But all of our actions online are available to our hosts. They’re stored on our hosts’ servers. They’re subject, if not absolutely legally—yet—to inspection at any time from any power that asserts itself if the host is (or is compelled to be) susceptible to it. This means the government, of course, but also anyone who can hack into the system.

The point is, we need to be reminded from time to time, what we do on Facebook stays on Facebook much longer than what we do in Vegas (for example) stays there. And that, I think, has serious consequences for our privacy in general.