Colleges and employers ARE looking at MySpace and Facebook and it doesn’t matter if they are marked private.  There are two things happening.   First, colleges are requesting to be a potential candidate’s friend.  Recruiters (academic, sports and even Greek Life related) send friend requests to applicants and let them know if the applicants have questions they can send them through Facebook or join a group page.  If the recruiter is able to connect they can now take a peek into the not-so-private lives of the “would be” student, athlete or sorority girl!  If the college ambassador is not allowed into the Facebook or MySpace page they are wondering why NOT.   There is an article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about this incase your teenager doesn’t believe me.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122170459104151023.html

By the way, if your child does get a friend request like this, I would hope that they would call the university to make sure the request is real and they are not walking into a potential hoax or phishing scandal.

The second way information on the private pages is leaking out is through tagging and search engines.  Tagging means to label a website or more commonly these days a picture.  So if there is a picture of me out there in cyberspace, I could add a label to the picture with my name, Lori Getz.  Now a search engine like google has my name attached to a photograph.  So when you search Lori Getz, my picture will appear in the image section of google. When kids tag pictures of themselves in photos on these social networking sites they are making their pictures searchable.  As a web designer I tag my web pages.  I add labels in the code so that people will find me.  My website, yourcec.org is tagged with all kinds of words, so when you search for Internet Safety, google will direct you to my website. So employers need go no further than google images and search for your child’s name.

Think about it.  With a shaky economy and multiple applicants for a single job, what better way for an employer to weed out the applicant pool.  Getting online and searching an applicant’s name is a lot faster than conducting a personal interview. I have friends (whom shall remain nameless) working at large financial institutions, brokerage firms, schools, and public policy, all of whom admit they get online to vet a potential candidate because it is just so easy to do.

We can try to keep some of this from leaking out but it requires due diligence on the part of the user (meaning your teenager)!  Check privacy settings to make sure you are only letting in those you want to see your life on Facebook.  You can join a group and not allow the group to see you but you have to pay attention.  You can also set up privacy setting to make it less likely for the search engines to find tags.  But none of this is fool proof. We can only control what we do on the net and not what everybody else is doing. Also, we cannot guarantee that the technology won’t fail and someone will accidentally be able to get in when they were not supposed to!  Just last week my prom picture appeared in Facebook for all to see, and it wasn’t me that posted it!

What kids NEED to understand is that when they POST to the Internet, in essence, they give up their right to privacy.  They don’t own the places where they leave the information and therefore they cannot control it.