Are you worried about what you’ve put on Facebook? Concerned that your current – or a future – employer will judge you on some of the personal and possibly foolish things about on the web? You should be.
Apparently 44 per cent of firms are using social network sites to check out job candidates. That was in October last year. And that’s just the ones who admitted to it.
So, what can we do? Well, the brilliant mind of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no less, was engaged on just this subject the other day. In an interview in London with the FT just before the launch of the web science research initiative (a new interdisciplinary field), he suggested that companies should create something along the lines of a code of conduct:
“I can imagine an employer that wants to be friendly to possible recruits assuring them ‘we won’t look at anything you put on the web before you were 18. Because we know that during that time people put up all kinds of things, but that’s not the way we’re going to run our company.’”
Which is all very well, but not exactly enforceable. So what else can we do? Sir Tim thinks that personal content should come with an automatic licence.
“I feel my own private data is something I don’t want to reveal to anybody, I don’t want it used to make the advertising on the websites I visit more effective, I don’t want it used for people to decide whether or not I’m employable, or whether I’m insurable.
“One possible direction is that we end up with a society in which we understand that information can be released for particular purposes. So you could imagine that I can release information of what I did on holiday including pictures and video – but license it in a way to say that you’re not allowed to use this for determining what I’ve been up to, to determine my pay raise or whether to employ me.”
He’s right, of course. And given the success of the Creative Commons licence, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine such a licence existing for personal data. The question is, as ever, who’s going to play by the rules?
