Question: twenty years ago, how would you have responded if a prospective employer asked to, say, take a peek at your private journals or peruse through your personal letters?
Today, the equivalent of such questions are showing up on job applications – a phenomenon that speaks to the dire erosion of our privacy in a voyeuristic internet age.
Think I'm making this up? Here's an image that is circulating widely today visually chronicling what is becoming a common practice in some industries:
Picture taken by SportzTawk.
The image above, presented by someone who was applying for a clerical law enforcement position, is a symptom of a wider problem: the erosion not just of our privacy, but of the notion of what privacy actually is.
In essence, we are suffering from an erosion of what I view as a fundamental right.
When an employer can unabashedly ask for a Facebook password and username from a prospective employee, and expect to receive such information, know this: Orwell is stirring uneasily.
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Author's Note 1: Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor of computer science, on this erosion of the notion of privacy in an internet age:
Technology has forced people to rethink the public/private distinction. “Now it turns out that there is private, public, and really, really public,” Lewis says. “We’ve effectively said that anyone in an Internet café in Nairobi should be able to see how much our house is worth.” Lewis has been blogging about such issues on the website www.bitsbook.com, a companion to Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, the 2008 book of which he is a coauthor. “We think because we have a word for privacy that it is something we can put our arms around,” he says. “But it’s not.”
Author's Note 2: Some might think that the image above, which comes from a law enforcement application, is merely a test to disqualify an applicant for handing over such information. I wish this were the case. However, the number of anecdotal cases of people not just being asked such questions on a form, but being asked for such information in real time so an employer can check one's personal accounts, seems to indicate otherwise.