Digital peeping

A timely article from the Atlantic Wire on government and corporate surveillance of social media. The later half of the article addresses how the Government and our outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act, circa 1986, opens doors to government entities who want to look at e-mail content, and how service providers comply most of the time:

In the second half of 2010 alone, the government sent 4,601 such requests to Google, who complied 94 percent of the time. 

 Your Social Media Will be Monitored

Ethics people!

Apple employees may have trouble keeping corporate secrets in their pockets, but the folks who find obviously confidential stuff seem to face a moral dilemma figuring out what to do with the things they find. A recent Gizmodo post, "Man Get Hard Drive Full of Secret Apple Documents", details how one Apple Store inadvertently gave a customer the store's back-up hard drive rather than a broken hard disk that the store replaced for the customer. Ok, ok, simple or complicated mix-up that can be blamed on "amateur hour" or "lack of adult supervision" at Apple, but the fact that the customer turns around and tries to sell the hard disk to the press is just plain stupid. Really, where are your scruples? Or at very least your sense of avoiding arrest? Semi-Bravo to Cult of Mac for telling the customer the right path, but only after publishing screen shots. Who knows if the right thing was done.

Not Again?!

Cnet reports that Apple loses another unreleased iPhone. Really? Dunno, something just ain't right.

Social Business #Fail?

Some very sober points on how Social Business could possibly avoid the fate of Knowledge Management.

The thing that struck me while reading this post is the fact that we seem to be backing into developing tools that really meet the requirements of their users. As my colleague Larry tweeted regarding this article:
  

"natural collab experience" = support my work-dont just push "social"

Although culture and change management in the enterprise play a factor in the success of collaboration within an organization, I'm also struck by the way social software is being developed in both the enterprise software and consumer spaces. As Ms. Buczek points out, collaboration in business goes beyond the firewall, and those who "get it" are turning to consumer tools to get things done. But while the consumer developers are trying to attract enterprise and figure out the "new e-mail" (which looks a lot like e-mail from 1990), enterprise software vendors are busy trying the reconstitute social media in their own style with a 1990's development model.

And so it goes, the primary ingredients that Ms. Buczek enumerates,

1. Integrated interfaces
2. Cross-organizational interaction
3. Streamlined identity
4. Device agnostic tools

fall by the wayside to serve the bipartisan consumer versus enterprise approach to software development and delivery. As Ms Buczek notes, there are lots of places we can start.

Your new job: maintaining your digital social reputation

It was only a matter of time that a service would pop up to help employers do background checks on your digital social life. According to a recent Forbes article:

The FTC determined that Social Intelligence Corp. was in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This means a search of what you’ve said or posted to Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/blogs and the Internet in general may become a standard part of background checks when you apply for a job.

The firm, Social Intelligence, keeps reports for 7 years for legal reasons but does not reuse them. This apparently allows you to clean up your digital trail. Or maybe you don't have to. I mean if you're a jerk it will come out sooner or later when you show up for work. All this does is make it easier for employers to figure that out before they hire you. Of course I'm waiting for the discrimination suit; which is most likely why Social Intelligence is keeping reports for 7 years. There are reasons why employers can't ask certain personal questions (i.e., your age) in interviews.

It is a good news is that employers need to disclose if they are doing a "social background check". I don't know about you but something about that phrase sounds really wrong. So at least there's transparency and the option to opt out of the check (and likely the job).

Since the checks can only access public information your new job might just be to make sure that privacy settings are always current on your social networks, especially if you're job hunting. The wild card is when someone else tags you or posts about you. Yet another reason to keep tabs on your social tools.