Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has some interesting ideas on privacy and social networking. Noting that people (especially young people) have a habit of posting private or potentially embarrassing information on public social networking sites, he predicted that “coming of age” in the future might have to include the creation of a new online persona to distance oneself from youthful online indiscretions. If that’s true, I wonder why would we limit reinventions of one’s online self to just a single coming of age life event. What about getting married: should the bride and the groom be able to change their names to disavow social networking posts made when they were single? Should divorcing couples be allowed to change their names to distance their online personas from when they were married? Should parents be allowed to change their names after they have children? What about switching political parties? Moving to a new city? And so on and so on.
How would such a trend apply to our professional personas? Increasingly, employees are asked to join social networks as online representatives for their company. If I post positive reviews of my current employer’s products and services, for instance, won’t I need a new persona if I change careers and go to work for a former competitor? Or if I post a competitive analysis casting another company’s product offerings in a negative light, won’t I need a new name if my company and that company merge? As it stands today, you certainly don’t have to look far to find lots of examples of statements made by corporate executives that they’ve come to regret after their business environment changes.
I doubt seriously if creating new online personas for each different life event becomes formalized anytime soon (informally, of course, people do it all the time with email and user name aliases). Instead, I expect governments to get involved soon (some already have) to legislate that when a person leaves a social network, the owner of the network must irrevocably delete all content that person created while a member. It remains to be seen how those privacy laws will effect 3rd party content aggregators and search engines.
As online privacy laws stand now, it should give people pause when participating in social networks. It should also be a big consideration for organizations thinking about getting into social networking. How much involvement can you expect of members on public social networking sites when it finally sinks in that anything they say “can and will be used against them” in the future?
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