Ethics of Facebook

In today’s world, one in five relationships start online, college students have hundreds of ‘friends’ on facebook, and google is the go-to source for information. We live in the age of the internet. There are many benefits to this online lifestyle. Faster acccess to information, and easier communication between you and your long distance friends, to name a few. What people don’t realize, however, is that unlike Las Vegas, what happens on the internet does not stay there. For example, pictures, chats, and status updates that a person puts on their facebook may disappear, but facebook saves everything you ever do on facebook. Not only that, but facebook has a right to look at that information at any time1. What seems like a private chat with your friends may not actually be so private. Taking it at step further, consider your pictures you put online. Even after you delete a picture from facebook, a quick search on a search engine can find that picture of you years later. It can be described as a ‘internet tattoo’ that you cannot hide. In past years, this has become a big issue for employers, employees, and job huntering students1. Consider how often you look someone up on facebook you’re curious about. You want to know more about a new friend you made, so you look them up on facebook and try to determine their favorite type of movie, what high school they went to, and what sports they play. Why can’t your employers do the same? It is very common for many employers to look up their candidates on facebook or online in general and snoop around for information. If you’ve ever put an inappropriate or less than professional picture online, count on it being seen. This is true whether or not you have strict privacy settings on your social networking site. There are programs that businesses pay a fine to use that can get past security settings on your facebook or myspace (does anyone have myspace anymore?). So when you think you are protecting yourself by making your profile private, you are mistaken. Furthermore, facebook is allowed to pull up years of history and find deleted pictures that you thought you got rid of1.
In the case study I looked at for class, a student lost a potential job because the business he applied to looked him up on facebook and found pictures the student did not know existed. Although he himself did not make the mistake of posting the pictures of himself, his friend did without asking permission. Here is the catch: as long as you are at someone else’s house or in public, you’re picture can be taken for non commerical uses (like a facebook). Although it was unthoughtful and most definitely unethical of his friend to post those pictures without asking, it is not illegal. However, it is an issue of ethics. When you take a picture of someone else that is not flattering, it may be rude to post it, but not unethical. However, posting a picture of a friend doing something either illegal or at least unprofessional, something that could get them in trouble and damage their image, it is unethical.
Can the student do anythin about it? No. Should he have been drinking with a bad friend in a public place in a way that was obviously not impressive to the business he applied to? No. A picture of someone holding an alcoholic drink is one thing, but these pictures obviously captured more than a small drink with friends if they were enough to persuade the business not to hire the student. In that case, the student has to own up to his own actions. He was drinking and partying in a bad way, and whether or not the actions that got him caught were ethical, he still has to be responsible for his own choice to drink in the first place. What we do in front of a camera is what gets us in trouble, not where the pictures end up later.
Clark, Amy. "Employers Look at Facebook, Too." CBS n. pag. Web. 15 Feb 2011. .