Should Job Applicants Provide Facebook Passwords? No. Unless It's the HR Manager Post They're After..

"Please enter your facebook log-in details." If that were one of the requests on a job application form, what would you do? When I first noticed streams of comments this week on the topic of employers asking (or demanding) to be able to view candidates' facebook pages I have to admit to thinking that this was just a limited bit of nonsense in some backward part of a distant state across the Pond.

It is real, though, and, whilst I am not sure how many actual instances have arisen or whether it might be restricted to applicants for professions where it might (I say 'might' - that doesn't mean I agree it should) be reasonable to make a thorough check of someone's personal publications, it is a worrying development.

If it is something that Human Resource Managers have decided to start including in the process of selecting from what must be an ever increasing pile of candidates for jobs in these days of high unemployment levels then I would like to add my voice to the objections being raised.

My first thought is 'Why just facebook?' This makes me think that there was a group of very intense and well-meaning sorts sat around a table one day who made the decision in a virtual vacuum, with little or no informed advice. One can imagine the discussion:

"Did you hear about that man who posted rude pictures on his ex-wife's facebook page?"
"Oh, terrible. Seems to be more of an unsocial network to me..."
"Yes, lots of youngsters putting silly images of themselves on there. No shame. What is the world coming to..."
"When I was young..."
"Exactly. It sounds a horrid place and not somewhere I'd want to let my children go."
"I suppose our employees do use it. Who knows what they're saying about working here..."
"Or us..."
"Hmmm. We ought to do something to check."
"We do. I regularly Google the names of some - you know, the ones we'd be worried about."
"So you know what they're doing there then?"
"No, there's some private setting or something they use to hide stuff from us. We would have to have their log-in thing."
"How about asking all our new applicants for that? That would give us some background as to what mischief they get up to and also probably cut down the number that get through to interview as well."
"Good idea. I'll get that added to the form. If they don't like it then that's a good indication that we wouldn't want to trust them anyway. Probably the sort that will come in half awake after being on that internet all night."

What I do find odd, though, is why this is all about facebook. There are rather more places than just the one everyone talks about out there and, of course, Google+ which has so far survived remarkably longer than I had anticipated in being readily accessible at work and in the Colleges I know about. Whilst one might expect a better class of people using the latter, if the HR Committee is going to want to look for the dirt then they really do have to realise that the social networking world is not called facebook. It seems that uninformed managers are beginning to use the term rather like they might use Biro or Hoover.

Then there are blogs which they don't seem to have thought much about at all. That's where I would write the stuff that I am most likely to be thrown out for, where HR would see what I thought about something, or what I got up to In The Village and that would be far more informative than some snaps on facebook.

It strikes me as quite wrong. In the rare instances of someone being suspected of publishing comments that damage their employer's reputation, provide information that should not be made public for commercial or other reasons or in cases of bullying then one would expect investigations to be facilitated to ascertain the accuracy of accusations with specific permissions being granted but some general rule that says someone can roam freely through areas that an individual has chosen, probably on good advice, to restrict to certain friends, is wrong, very wrong.

I can imagine the band of social do-gooders raging against my comments and saying things like "If they have to hide what they say or do then they shouldn't say or do it." My view would be to say to the individuals concerned that they should continue to decide what they wish to be in the public domain and, if they're asked to reveal more, look elsewhere. Unless they're applying for an HR Manager post - in which case they should tidy up their act temporarily first, supply all the passwords with a nice smile, get the job and then fire whoever instigated this in the first place!

The section below is from ZDNetUK's article by David Meyer:

Asking job applicants for passwords is not in itself unlawful in the UK, according to Ed Goodwyn, partner in the employment team at law firm Pinsent Mason.
This disturbing practice represents a grave intrusion into personal privacy.
– US senators Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer
There is also unlikely to be a breach of the Data Protection Act if the applicant hands over login details willingly, he noted. However, Goodwyn agreed there are some risks for prospective hirers.
"If the employer relies on a protected characteristic which is apparent from the Facebook pages (such as that the candidate is a trade union activist, is disabled, etc.) then that will be unlawful," Goldwyn said. "Furthermore, once the employment relationship is formed, any further use of Facebook in this way without further permission from the employee would be a breach of the implied duty of trust and confidence."
Companies could also face legal problems if they treat a worker less favourably for refusing the request, he noted.

Why am I here?

No, I know about the Mum & Dad thing, it's not that sort of 'why am I here?' I was just wondering out loud why I spend so much time on Google+ nowadays and used to spend similar vast numbers of hours on twitter, blogs and, rather longer ago now, Facebook.

Twitter I understand. Tweeting is like shouting at the television, except more people hear what I say. It's easy, just type a few words as I'm watching something and get a kick out of making someone laugh. It's also been a useful place to get great links to things that are going on in the worlds that interest me and, with careful choice of who to follow, provided a newsreel that was almost essential reading each morning and still is something I'll scroll through once or twice a week, especially for local news and where the people haven't started on Google+.

Facebook was once a place where I thought I would build a sort of virtual world of Me, with huge volumes of photo albums, blogs routed to its Notes pages and Facebook pages for this and that, events I could invite people to or write about and generally keep up-to-date with what friends were saying. I use the term 'friends' loosely - and Facebook friends almost deserves its own entry in the dictionary. The 150 or so who were in my list comprised a strange collection of family, socially-inclined relatives, ex-students needing help and geeky nice people I met at conferences. And a bundle of others I didn't really know very well or occasionally worked with but added as friends anyway. Now its only use is as the place to post an urgent message for one of my children and I genuinely can't remember when I last specifically visited the site or changed my status as Google+ and Twitter updates do that automatically. The funny thing is that most of my 'Facebook friends' probably still think I'm really active there.

Blogs are great for articles and I do love writing and publishing my thoughts and views. So instead of writing piles of notes and uploading them to VLEs or digging out Dreamweaver to edit my web sites I can simply type, add and publish. Job done. I don't think I've changed how or why I use blogs much at all over the last ten years. Apart from Blogger's recent misbehaviour with page links and the advent of Posterous making publishing almost anything delightfully simple being naughty and nice respectively, if I want to write more than 140 characters and also refer to it again in future then a blog has been the answer.

And then along comes Google+. I jumped in at the very start and now have the dubious honour of being ranked by CircleCount in the top 600 men in the UK. Quite what that actually means I'm not sure but, bearing in mind that there are fewer MPs than that, it can't stay long at that level and I'll surely be plunging before long to the ranks of those who ramble on about this and that and have an average number of followers. But I didn't join to get some rank anyway. Why do I write stuff there? I hardly know any of my followers. Or, for that matter, those I follow. I get a brief description of what they do for most and think they may be of interest in one or more areas of the world I inhabit and they go into one or other Circles. Occasionally someone will have a query so I feel that I can be of help and publish advice or even an answer. Equally, there are some damn fine minds there who can provide answers and inspiration.  But that's not the only reason I'm there. The news is good. Like the Twitter newsreel I mentioned above, the Google+ stream is something I'll scroll through several times a day. But even that's not what it was as I now have so many people in the stream from all walks of life and background that it's neither one thing nor the other. One moment I am reading about some fascinating new ideas about teaching and the next there's a video of Andorra's entry in Eurovision. Or a cat doing something cute.

So why am I here (or there, as this is mainly about the time I spend on Google+)?

Twitter: An Amateur Astronomer's Tale

As you sit in meetings today or plan lessons and listen to people telling you how terribly bad twitter is and is just used by students to waste time here's a simple little example of how you might try and change some views. I've often looked up at a night sky and wondered what the stars were and occasionally, very occasionally in the past, seen a shooting star streak across a black background above me. In the last few months I have learned a little about meteors and meteor showers and shown my children and friends where to look and when to see some of these wonderful sights themselves.

I'm really not the type of person to stand in a field at night staring at the sky at all but someone called @VirtualAstro inspired me to do just that. I don't know his name. He lives in Berkshire somewhere and that's his twitter name. I've been following him for a while now and he tells us in simple terms when there is likely to be something worth looking for. An amateur, with equipment he'd collected over years and spent all his savings on, he also publishes great pictures of what's going on up there for the benefit of those of us who may have missed a nice display.

I can't remember how I started following him. I expect someone I was already following must have mentioned him in one of their tweets and that was it.

This morning his news was not about the stars. Someone had broken into his house and stolen all his equipment, including some really old but valuable bits and pieces. Gradually, in a series of short bursts of less than 140 characters each, the story unfolded. The police had been. The insurance company had said the valuable bits weren't covered. He couldn't afford to replace them. The police catch the burglar. Some idiot had sold everything for £200 to buy drugs. He refused to identify the dealer who had got the equipment now. The police said he wouldn't see it again. The poor fellow was angry and devasted. Then he gets a pile of kind messages from followers and donations from some of them too. I don't know how much he has got so far but he's obviously amazed. You can just tell from his words that in a matter of hours he turned from being totally distressed to overwhelmed by the good nature of people he's never met.

This isn't much to do with education of e-learning, I know, and I'm sure there are far more dramatic stories out there that twitter or other social networks have featured in. I just felt that I had to write about this one. It happened this morning.

And if you hear of any Japanese Series 4000 super wide and ultra wide eyepieces for sale, let me or @VirtualAstro know. I have no idea what they are but the twitterverse will and it would be so good if someone somewhere can bring a happy ending to this episode.

The World's Simplest On-line Safety Policy (well... America's, at least...)

This is an excellent article on the subject of child protection and how managers scared of their institution being sued ban access and stifle communication.

Someone should now write in a similar vein with adjustments to reflect UK legislation instead of America's. I'll have a go myself if nothing appears soon. I am tired of hearing about decent and good colleagues being threatened with dismissal because they share information over social network sites, their own web sites, wikis or whatever or dare to use their own e-mail rather than the institution's to communicate with a student.

And if you're reading this and can only think of one reason why any teacher might want to do so then I sincerely hope that my 14-year-old daughter and 9 and 12-year-old sons are not being taught by you or staff under your control.

It is time for good, innovative and decent teaching staff to stand up and be trusted.

Two things I've only just realised I don't do any more

It has just occurred to me that there are two things I used to do a lot but which I haven't done at all this year! In fact, it may have been for a lot longer and I probably don't think I'll be doing either very much at all in the future. How quickly things change.

No, nothing to do with New Year's resolutions. I didn't even try. No, these are both ways of doing something that had become quite sort of normal - in one case it had been pretty essential for years and years, the other a comparatively recent thing to do most days. I surprised myself when it dawned on me but that probably says more about my observation or awareness skills than anything else.

I'm talking about photocopying and Facebook publishing. Sorry if you thought I was about to reveal some deeply entrenched habit or fascinating personal facts but this is a vaguely e-learning and education-related blog. I used to photocopy every morning. Sometimes there was quite a social scene in the Library where the best photocopier was sited as we all queued and hoped we'd be able to carry our piles of handouts or copied draft strategies or whatever back to the classroom or office in time for whatever it was we proposed to do with them. On cold days, that paper was wonderfully warm too.

Whilst I definitely did notice that my photocopying had dramatically diminished some years ago, mainly due to publishing all my materials and notes on my web site or the VLE, I hadn't realised that it had completely stopped. I hadn't even sneaked in a copy of my driving licence or some bill I was sending off which I'm sure everyone does from time to time.

I did need a copy of a few bits and pieces that weren't available on-line recently but I just photographed them and used the picture. I suppose that took a bit longer but the funny thing is that I never thought twice about it. I needed to send someone something and just whipped the camera out and did so. It was in colour, too, not shades of grey.

The Facebook thing is possibly the biggest surprise, though. I quite like Facebook and regularly browse through what various people are doing but it was only when I looked at my own profile page that I saw that my entries were all from one or other of a range of applications that feed Facebook rather than my actually typing in the boxes there. Apart from an occasional profile picture change, comments on someone's comments or picture and maybe a few photos of my own that is it. Quite different to even as recently as last year when I was often updating my status or something.

The big change is largely due to finding a nice feed application in RSSGraffiti which picks up what I publish in various places and throws it into Facebook and using Rockmelt, a great new browser based on the super-fast Chrome. Rockmelt provides a dead simple panel to display what's going on in Facebook without actually having to visit the full page. That's basically all I want. Rockmelt also provides similar panels for my e-mail and Twitter and it is Twitter that nowadays gets most of my attention. If I want to share something I share it there and that goes to all sorts of interesting people as well as Facebook.

Facebook is largely now a 'friends' place for me and I can't recall when I last had any interaction there of any significant 'work' relevance. Twitter is still almost entirely 'work' in terms of who follows me and sees what I say but I am increasingly using it for other things I like to share, be they thoughts on potholes, design, X Factor views or what my son's doing at school that he shouldn't. The people I follow cover all those things and more and, increasingly, I'm getting a lot of local news that way as well as great links to new web tools and the like.

I wonder I'll give up for 2012?

In two minds

I'm in a bit of a quandary about Facebook and Twitter. Up until now I've been using Facebook mostly for social stuff and Twitter for slightly more serious work-related thoughts. Occasionally they've overlapped or I've used Twitter to say something that just occurred to me but generally Twitter seems more suited to the quick comment than Facebook.

Lots of people, though, do use Facebook status messages very much like Twitter and I get streams of odd thoughts, outbursts, comments and rants changing the home page every few minutes. The people I like to communicate with are also spaced out across the two so Facebook friends miss my tweets and vice versa.

Perhaps I'm not so much mad (previous article!) but schizophrenic now, displaying one character in one place and another in the other! So I've decided to join the two which means my poor Facebook friends will now see their home pages scrolling down even more quickly as my tweets get added and what was once a weekly status change could turn into several times a day or more as the mood takes me. There's always the Remove button so I shall not feel too bad.

I divided the two initially when I noticed that a colleague tended to send tweets every few minutes from various conferences she attended. She had the two accounts linked so I was getting everything twice and some days the whole of my Facebook home page was occupied with copies of tweets I'd already seen and wasn't really wanting to see again. I didn't really want to annoy or bore non-work Facebook friends with my tweets so stopped Facebook collecting them. I don't seem to have got into that tweet-a-minute gossip mode, though, so, hopefully the increased status changes won't now be too much of a nuisance to Facebook friends.

Something else I noticed about my behaviour was that I tended to think before changing my Facebook status - not so much about what I was writing but who would be likely to read it. Tweets didn't matter - they seemed more transient (although I am aware that Google can now locate and publish them!) - and the likelihood of actually seeing any of my followers other than a couple of people was almost non-existent. I quite liked that laissez-faire approach (and also got the message out much more quickly) so my Facebook friends will be seeing more of that now.

Until I decide that I prefer schizophrenia again.