Facebook Privacy–Keep your Profile Clean

Facebook is an indicator of our trashier sides. Even with privacy settings, we are still at the mercy of our friends’ posting and picture taking habits. In an aptly named article, “Reppler is the Morning After Pill for your Facebook Profile,” Fast Company looks into a company that is working with Facebook to create some type of process that will save us from friends that just won’t stop posting inappropriate pictures.

Reppler is taking the approach that some subscribers–mostly college students–do not know just how damaging their Facebook profiles can be to a job hunting process. Second to Google, Facebook is one of the first places HR recruiters look when they want to gauge the personality of candidates. If you were applying for a job, would you want a recruiter to see all of your pictures? Probably not.

The company will help manage your connections, so blocking people would not be necessary. Since Facebook has been pretty adamant about maintaining transparency and subjecting subscribers to questionable privacy policies (granted Facebook is getting better), I am surprised that they are open to such a partnership.

Should we really care about what people are doing on Facebook? Not really…but we do. Social media has become a metric against which we measure current and prospective friends. I keep a mental list of my friends who post a few too many pictures or update their status a million times a day. I notice, and I judge. It only follows that prospective employers will do the same. Who knows if Reppler will take off, but either way, we need to take control of our Facebook profiles. And always remember there is always somebody watching.