Privacy and the Internet

Remember that photo you posted of yourself on Flickr five years ago when you were on vacation in the Caribbean?  You know, the one where you are in a bikini downing a rum and coke and giving a thumbs-up?  Or how about the one night you were feeling lonely, and posted on a personal dating site that you were looking for some company?  Or the time you joined a Yahoo discussion group called "divorced moms who suffered child abuse"?  You probably don't remember.  But your potential employer will, if they use one of the new background check services that scours everything about you ever put on the internet.

As the paper of record reported yesterday, some employers are using Social Intelligence, a service that scours the internet for everything a potential employee may have done, said, or posted for the past seven years.  Everyone knows (or should know) by now that what you post on Facebook might not be so private.  Social Intelligence digs deeper though, looking at what Yahoo Groups you may have joined, any blog posts or comments you may have made, bulletin boards you may have posted on, Craigslist postings, and anything else that bears your prints on the internet.

The internet has made us all into amateur detectives.  Who hasn't googled someone to see what they can find out about them?  Yet the internet is also changing and forever altering our notion of privacy.  What Social Intelligence does is the equivalent of interviewing friends, family, and everyone else an employee may have known to find out embarrassing information.  I think most people would be outraged if employers had the right to dig that deep into our personal lives.  Somehow, though, because it is done through the internet, people seem to accept these deeper invasions of privacy.

In their influential article "The Right to Privacy," future Supreme Court Justices Warren and Brandeis argued that in a legal sense "the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life, -- the right to be let alone...."  This basic right, later found to "emanate" from the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, has been under attack for years, mostly by abortion rights activists, who say there is no such right in the Constitution.  Companies like Social Intelligence further undermine whatever right to privacy is left.

Privacy, of course, implies that a person is doing something in private.  By doing something in public, a person essentially waives his right to privacy with respect to that thing.  The internet confuses these two domains:  when a person posts something in an internet chat room, he is assuming it is private.  However, the reality is that nothing going out on the internet is private.  The best practice is to assume that everything going out over the internet is public.