Build an Online Presence Without Giving Up Privacy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/opinion/social-media-privacy.html

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Every hiring manager will do a Google search on your name, most companies keep an eye on your social networks, and in several industries, you’re expected to have an online presence. With all this online performance, is it possible to retain some semblance of privacy?

Digging through a job candidate’s or employee’s social media is commonplace. According to a CareerBuilder survey from 2017, around 70 percent of polled employers screen a candidate’s social media accounts before bringing them in for an interview. That same poll also found that over 50 percent of employers found candidates with no social footprint problematic. Which means most of us need to find some sort of balance.

I asked a handful of freelance journalists and designers how they approach social media and they all told me the same thing: They treat it all like the public forums that they are. Their various profiles exist as professional outlets and nothing else. For job seekers in a time when “culture fit” is nearly as important as skills, every social network might as well be LinkedIn.

Your social networks don’t need to be a full expression of yourself. You can pick and choose which ones represent what version of yourself you want to present, and which ones are public-facing. We have no problem compartmentalizing and customizing our IRL personas depending on all sorts of factors, like being at work, or a nice restaurant, or at a barbecue for a kid’s birthday. Doing the same thing online shouldn’t be a problem. A former editor of mine, Adam Pash, describes this as the piecemeal approach, and it’s one of the few tactics for controlling an online identity that makes sense to me.

Pick a couple of social networks you want to use for work, and leave the rest private or don’t engage with them at all. This method also makes it easy to abandon a service when it inevitably makes some bad choices and allows you to define the community based on what you’re sharing.

Of course, we also shouldn’t share everything publicly, but we’re still social creatures with access to a wide variety of tools for communicating with one another. Every freelancer, job hunter or semipublic figure I chatted with used a variation of a hacked-together “private social network” to chat with small to medium-size groups. They essentially sandboxed their social selves into various less public apps, like a group text, Slack or Discord. New parents relegated baby pictures to private album sharing or dedicated apps like Tinybeans. A pair of siblings used Snapchat solely for family in-jokes. It’s mostly the sort of conversations that used to happen on Facebook before threads were made unintentionally public, alerting friends-of-friends that so-and-so’s aunt had commented on your brother’s wife’s status update. It’s easier and more private to just share directly with the people we actually like talking to.

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But don’t forget that even if you do create smaller, more personal networks, anything you do online can be made public, either by a hack or another party in a conversation. We saw the most bluntly obvious version of this when Harvard rescinded its admission offer to Kyle Kashuv after former classmates posted screenshots of racist comments in a Google Doc file on Twitter. It’s best to assume everything you do and say online can be exposed, even if it’s not on a public social network.

Just having an account on a social network generates all sorts of data about you. There’s not much you can do about that. A browser extension, like Privacy Badger, can at least cut off data-hungry social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

There’s another option for developing an online presence that doesn’t leak any data you don’t want it to, if you’re willing to put in the effort: a personal website. Last year, a Vice reporter, Jason Koebler, made a compelling case for bringing personal websites back into style. Before Facebook, setting up your own page on sites like Xanga or LiveJournal was common, and the data controls were simple. This technology is still available to us, easier to use then ever, and gives you control over the privacy levers. Just don’t share a résumé with your phone number on it.

Personal websites are already a must-have in a variety of industries, and paying to set up your own guarantees the data is generally in your control. Buying your own domain and setting up a site also gets you a dedicated email address, like yourname@yourname.com, and pulls you away from Google’s obtrusive Gmail.

Bonus: When your web address is your name, there’s a good chance it’ll bubble up to the top of Google search results with little effort from you.

Retaining the type of social footprint required for work while still managing personal privacy isn’t easy, nor is it foolproof. Terms of service and privacy policies change on a whim, and sites like Facebook tend to move the various privacy toggles around so often that it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve changed. If you must be online, a requirement for so many jobs these days, at least take control over what’s shared and treat a majority of social networks for what they are: a résumé.

Continuing on this theme, I decided to see what other privacy-invasive extremes existed in the job-hunting world. In the Aug. 19, 1977, issue of The New York Times I found mention of pre-employment polygraph tests, which sounds about as invasive as you can get.

Employers administered polygraph tests in a variety of circumstances, including for positions as a clerk at Tiffany & Co. or a typist at Olden Camera. In regard to the privacy concerns, one tester glossed over any issues, implying his own intuition about privacy standards was enough:

“There is no invasion of privacy in this test,” said Allen Coppage, who has been giving the tests for 20 years. “I understand the rights of the individual, and I have no interest in abridging those rights. But people sometimes forget that companies have rights, too.”

Back in 1977, the American Civil Liberties Union raised issues about the practice, pointing out some obvious types of problems we can see with the benefit of hindsight:

These are the kinds of incidents the ACLU hears about all the time, according to Trudi Hayden, director of the organization’s privacy project. “Even if the polygraph were totally accurate — and we don’t believe that,” she said, “and even if the questioning didn’t stray into issues like sexual preference and drug use, which we have been told it does, we would still be opposed to these tests. There are points beyond which an employer should not go.”

The practice of using polygraphs continued for over a decade until 1988, when the Labor Department issued regulations forbidding most private employers from using lie detectors. Congress estimated two million polygraph examinations were conducted in the year before the ban.

Last month, a Washington Post reporter, Geoffrey A. Fowler, decided to see what credit card companies did with the data from a single purchase. It turns out that data gets spread around quickly. Even if all that data is kept internal, a lot of companies touch every single purchase you make. There’s the bank that issues the card, any retail partners like Target or Amazon, and the credit card network itself. It’s obvious when it’s all laid out in front of you, but jarring to think about nonetheless.

With all those companies vying for a piece of that data pie, opting out is a complicated procedure. Some sites offer you the ability to opt out with a direct link, but countless others require you to make a phone call:

Chase

American Express

Visa

Mastercard

Citibank requires a phone call: 888-214-0017

Discover requires a phone call: 800-225-5202

If you use a smaller bank or credit union, you’ll need to dig through the privacy policy to find a way to opt out. Pretty much every online retailer does similar tracking — so many that it will probably take you a solid day of work to opt out of everything. Simple Opt Out is a website that includes links, email addresses and phone numbers for opting out of tracking at most popular stores.

Ever wondered where you could hire an unlicensed private investigator to illegally spy, install spyware or place a GPS tracker on a car? According to Vice, up until recently all you needed to do was look on the freelancer site Fiverr.

Google’s Project Zero security research team revealed a broad iPhone security vulnerability that affected anyone who visited a handful of websites. It’s initially unclear what those sites were or who was affected. Apple patched the vulnerabilities, so update your iPhone or iPad to the newest version of iOS.

The video game “Telling Lies” puts you in the role of an employee of the National Security Agency, unraveling a mystery using surveillance footage in a sort of modern-day version of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” The intimacy in the more banal footage offers a good counterpoint to the “I have nothing to hide” argument.

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