Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns  about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook  (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).

Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW  Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41%  turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.

Quite the opposite to being social!

This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted  attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)
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Last January Microsoft commissioned a survey  involving 2500 Recruiting Professionals, HR and consumers.  The results were startling for job seekers in the US.  Three out of four said that reviewing online information has become a part of the formal hiring process. 79% said that they research on candidates online, Googling or trolling Facebook or YouTube and picture sharing sites. A whooping 70% admitted that they have rejected candidates based on what they saw in the online profiles!!!

Law Governing Equal Opportunity

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Title VII goes further to prohibits discrimination against an individual because of his or her association with another individual of a particular race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Is the act of rejecting an applicant based on his/her social media profile an act of denying opportunity without any sufficient cause? Is EEOC aware of this widespread practice?

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It’s been a while since my last posting and a lot has happened in the marketing world. I figured that with the recent spate of interesting developments, the timing would be right to post my next blog update. Here are some of the newsworthy developments in the blogosphere and my personal views on them…

Google and China – Starting off with the news that’s been dominating all the RSS feeds and blog posts…Will they or won’t they? Will Google finally take a stand and walk out of a booming market or will they bow down to the higher powers. While Google in the past had agreed to censor search results in accordance with government policies in China, it is no longer willing to do so. Miffed at the reports about hacking of personal email accounts of human rights activist, Google threatened to take its business out of the China market. However, as I write, the analysts are still speculating on what will be the outcome of this tug-of-war. While on one end, Google is talking about the right to free information and privacy laws, on the other end China is questioning the double standards by Google. Several cyber-security experts claim that “e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google’s own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.” While I firmly believe in freedom of speech and information, I also wish that all the facts come out in the open before we make any judgments on this issue.. More details on this here. Also read Google’s official statement here

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It was all Treats…No Tricks

13 is not necessarily an unlucky number. On October 27, Forrester announced the winners of Groundswell Awards for 2009. For the first time this year, the Awards included a Business-to-Business category. Regalix was one of the lucky thirteen in B2C, B2B and Employee & Non Profit categories.

It was a matter of great pride for us at Regalix to bag this prestigious Award in B2B Spreading category for MetricStream’s community- Compliance Online.

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