13 ms·

Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

149 points by donmcc 14y ago

justinhj 14y ago
Universal health care pretty much nullifies this threat
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Lasher 14y ago
It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!
- wtvanhest 14y ago
  Well, I wouldn't have hired those people regardless of their Facebook postings. Facebook just mirrors what I see in reality. If someone is so short sighted that they post things that will keep them from being hired, they are likely engaging in a number of behaviors which are not helpful to them getting hired.
  - Ntrails 14y ago
    Equally, I post many things on facebook that I would not expect an employer to like - but I restrict their viewing to people I directly know. The entire scenario of a highly savvy person having a publicly viewable page that is then used against her is slightly absurd
- frooxie 14y ago
  I bet most people NOT on Facebook have one person in their social circle that they would not hire base on what they've seen them do in real life - people they might have considered hiring if they'd interacted on Facebook instead.
- 16s 14y ago
  Some HN readers don't have Facebook accounts. I don't.
fiatmoney 14y ago
I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
- majormajor 14y ago
  Just a few weeks ago I was checking out my feed on my phone at lunch and saw a post from an old friend I hadn't talked to in years saying he was visiting town for a few days. I sent him a message and we ended up hanging out one night that week, and we had a blast. Or, last year, there was an old friend who'd seen one of my updates pop up in her feed, and decided to send me a quick message to see what I was up to these days. We ended up talking and hanging out quite a bit, and now she's become one of my closer friends, after we had drifted out of touch for years due to moving away. Without Facebook, would we have been on each other's email list or blog or whatever non-social-network method of sharing info? Probably not. Those aren't the only things it's done for me, either -- and just two days ago I got another one of those sorts of messages, though it's too early to know if anything more than a quick "oh here's what I'm up to these days, how about you" exchange will come of it. But I think even that's worthwhile. I'm also not particularly concerned about them having cookied me and learning a bunch of sites I've visited through that. There it's mostly a numbers thing -- out of all the millions of users, I'm not too worried about someone deciding to try to hassle me with my info somehow. Compare that risk with how easy it's made it to reconnect with all those old friends. (I'll talk about the nightmare scenario of this post in a separate comment, this is just meant to illustrate the positives vs the current negatives.)
- kevinnk 14y ago
  The advantage for me at least is volume. In online interaction you can connect with a large number of people at once. For example, it's easy to carry a chat conversation with 2 or 3 people whereas in real life you'd need to actually have everyone in the same room, interested in the same topic, etc. Of course the trade off is usually depth (and as you mentioned, privacy) so it's not always the best thing. But it is very helpful for short updates with people you don't talk to otherwise.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
So what? Company A does not want you because of some stupid unscientific mumbo-jumbo, you just head to Company B on the other side of the street. This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe. But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.
- makomk 14y ago
  Then Company C decides to do business with Company A rather than Company B because Company B isn't following the latest mumbo-jumbo, and ao on...
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    So company B can do business with company D. They never liked company C much anyway.
pgroves 14y ago
I don't think this scenario could play out that way. - Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature. - The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data. - If the situation presented in the article gets even close to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee. [edit: removed meanness]
- fl3tch 14y ago
  That last point is interesting. There's already a burgeoning industry for companies that protect privacy, keep you off Zaba Search-type sites, etc. There are a few "reputation management" companies that try to get negative information removed or pushed down in search results. The next logical step is to just pay someone to create profiles with great content.
- dm8 14y ago
  For last point, there is a startup that specializes in your online reputation management. EDIT: There are lot of companies in online reputation management. Even today.
- gaius 14y ago
  - Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends Doesn't matter if they are still accessible to FB themselves tho'!
bproctor 14y ago
I think this is a little pessimistic. If you have the capability to be able to predict a persons life, personality, etc. for the capability of hiring someone, you also have the capability to match people with their dream jobs. Ones that they would excel at.
Tooluka 14y ago
This definitely will happen. Like 100% sure. It happens right now, the beginning. And facebook won't be some magic data provider, maybe they'll supply 1-2% of all data if the company will survive for so long at all. Behavioral prediction will be Very precise. And you won't be able to anything, all endpoints will be controlled - ISP, cell operators, physical stores that sell hardware, banking, payment alternatives (bitcoin etc.). They are mostly controlled now, there is just no such precise and powerful analytical programs. This won't be end of the world or the internet. Not even close to it. Things just will be different in the future and people would accept them.
Wilya 14y ago
The hypothetical analytics company in the article scares me, because I'm pretty convinced it will exist at some point. I mean, there are already quite a lot of people who try to do it, but at some point, someone will achieve non-garbage enough results and use them to screen job or insurance applications. Or will just be good enough at marketing to convince insurance company that the results aren't garbage. It's probably fine for people who can afford to refuse a job offer based on ethical issues, but the overwhelming majority of people don't have that luxury.
michaelochurch 14y ago
LinkedIn scares me more, because I think most 22-year-olds don't really foresee that they might have the need to change their career histories. The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22. I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile but it occasionally comes in handy to have access to the people in the network. I think more people are going to be burned by consistency risk (even unintentional and non-deceptive) than by what we tend to think of as garden-variety embarrassing stuff. I also don't think anyone with data mining talent is going to work for health insurance companies doing intrusive cross-site work for less than a million per year (we're talking about work that isn't just unpleasant or boring but actually evil) and I can't see those companies paying that much. They'll hire more cheaply and get crappy work and the world will be fine.
- tptacek 14y ago
  It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. Meanwhile, we talk to lots of great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles; it is by no means a standard requirement. If you can't be honest to LinkedIn, just keep your profile off it. No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm, so this health insurance story about reading tea leaves out of Facebook wall posts to ding people's premiums seems far fetched.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is fraud; the other is just how people work. The problem is that, if you get caught in one of those minimal and ethically acceptable lies, or are just accidentally inconsistent, HR won't make the distinction because of the mythology that small discrepancies beget substantial whoppers. In my experience, this isn't true. Deeply unethical people are so experienced with lies that they almost never get caught in the small stuff. I don't need to lie because I'm a person of high enough social status that I don't see it useful to fake, and I'm comfortable having an online presence because I foresee that remaining true, but I have no dislike for high-caliber, low-status people who use a bit of creative revision to up their game, as long as they're not defrauding or hurting people.
majormajor 14y ago
If these companies learn everything about everyone, what happens if what they discover is that most people have their own little problems and health issues and craziness? The truly awesome people with absolutely nothing wrong with them? Good luck finding them! As far as the migraine bit goes: there are already some sorts of medical discrimination that are illegal to use for hiring in the US, though I don't know exactly what is and isn't currently allowed. But analyzing someone's FB posting to try to find out that they suffer from migraines seems like the sort of thing that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law and would quickly get shot down. And the Affordable Care Act is already taking steps towards making it illegal for insurance companies to abuse this sort of information. If you don't like the scenario in the article, keep that in mind next time you wonder about whether government regulation is ever appropriate.
- DigitalJack 14y ago
  As long as they don't put it in writing, there would be no case. People are not hired or fired for illegal reasons all the time. You just don't state those reasons. If it is due to blatantly obvious handicaps, that's a different story. But good luck proving you we're passed over because the employer figured out you have headaches.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice? There wouldn't be any whistleblowers? People would be willing to contract their HR stuff out to them? In my view, there's a pretty bright line between the described business and today's background check companies.
    - jbigelow76 14y ago
      >So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice? What are they doing that's illegal? You aren't applying for a job with them so they aren't the ones who passed you over for "somebody who's a better fit".
analyst74 14y ago
The narrative is also likely to play out this way: "Well, 9 out of 10 candidates we interviewed has some sort of health problems. Tina is great in all other fronts, I guess we'll just have to live with it." But regardless, social judgement/ranking is zero-sum game, if someone is losing out due to some social change, others are winning.
- mikeash 14y ago
  I disagree that it's a zero-sum game. The rankings themselves are zero-sum, but the correctness of those rankings can have huge consequences. If a change occurs which causes people who are less suited for a job to be preferred, that results in a lower global outcome.
Angostura 14y ago
The correct headline should surely be 'Gen Y's Facebook Nightmare', Facebook isn't damaged in this scenario, unless it triggers a privacy backlash.
crazygringo 14y ago
I think this just reveals bad hiring practices, more than anything else. There are 1,000 different things that can affect your productivity. Maybe her migraines cause 15% "lost productivity", but her enthusiasm causes 35% better quality work, her daydreaming cuts 10%, and her intelligence adds 20%, the fact she's stimulated by spicy food adds 5%, etc. Companies that might attempt to do this kind of micro-analysis miss the forest for a few trees, will be less competitive in the long run, and over time will die out.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  It's even sillier than that. The performance gap between the best and worst is a factor of hundreds or even millions and the best performers are very rare and expensive. Worrying about a 15% performance loss is like finding a $100 bill and complaining that there was not a penny too. In reality, these social analysis companies will be data mining to find people far to the right on the performance bell curve. They might try to weed out the particularly crazy, but the ones you most want to weed out are masters of deception.
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10098 14y ago
I think this mostly relies on the assumption that all of Tina's posts are public. What of by 2018 people will learn to make all of their facebook posts friends-only?
- jarek 14y ago
  What if by 2018 "friends only" is no longer an option? Or what if the software extracts this data out of explicitly public Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin posts that were intended by the user to read neutral and employable?
dm8 14y ago
Even I breathe in the world of information management & data science, I never thought about this possibility! I for one hope this should never happen. Mining your data to do pattern matching whether your are healthy or not? Are you kidding me? We tend to forget there is something "socio technical gap" (as demonstrated by Mark Ackerman - bit.ly/UqlNLI), meaning our social world cannot to be mapped into virtual world using technology since tech is not mature. We will never be able to close the socio-technical as our brains are too complicated. I fear for our kids if this is future.
- Bud 14y ago
  Future? I'd be shocked if most of what is outlined in the article is not already happening NOW, in some form, if perhaps a bit less developed. And we know for a fact that Facebook data is being scanned by employers, in a mandatory fashion, and being used to screen employees: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-facebook-password-gets-teachers-aide-fired-642699 http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-...
olefoo 14y ago
Let me present a slightly more dystopian twist to this already unpleasant future scenario. In the future the pool of jobs that require a human and do not require an Olympian level of focus and dedication that few people can hope to achieve without major sponsorship is going to be quite small. In other words the job market is going to become even more of a winner take all contest, and less of a matching market. The question the hiring committee will be asking will be "Given her past history, if we hire her will she be one of the top five negotiators _in_our_industry_?" and if the answer is no... then she might not find a job at all.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
Here's an easy one somebody could write up over the weekend: You apply for a job with a resume. The resume lists the dates you worked various jobs. So you just go out and comb the social networks to find all the posting times for this person and cross-reference it with their work hours. You've just made a predictor of how much time they'll be spending on your dime trolling the net. Now perhaps that's only 1 in 20 secondary factors you look at in hiring. But I bet it's easily one of those 20.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  Mobile is gonna skew that factor, if I'm at work and I tweet I do it from my phone, even if I'm sitting in front of my computer at home I'll still usually tweet from my phone just so I don't have to open another tab and nav to twitter's home page. Now if you could poll how long I spend on google reader in a given day...
- pc86 14y ago
  You also get into some issues with time off, vacations, etc. But I have no doubt companies (and the naive prospective employees) that have this type of access do that.
hooande 14y ago
Facebook appears to be immune from privacy concerns. No matter what they do, the average person will keep using it. So what's to stop facebook from offering a "Narrative Data" style service of their own? If facebook said, "we're going to show potential employers and insurers a report based on your activity" do you think that would be enough to get people to delete their accounts? The average college student isn't going to significantly change their behavior because of a hypothetical job offer in a vague future. Most of the people they know will also be posting party pics and talking about health issues...they aren't doing anything wrong. As other comments have pointed out, no one is perfect. Everyone has something they don't want people to know, and most of those things aren't a big deal. Even if facebook prepared and sold general reports about everyone's activity, I don't think it would cause enough harm to get people to stop using it.
- deleted 14y ago
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rayiner 14y ago
Who wants to start a Gen Y-focused employment discrimination firm with me?
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fruchtose 14y ago
While data mining on this scale is only barely science fiction, I don't see it progressing it this far for a number of reasons: 1. Users. Once Facebook users learn that their public data will be used for these purposes, people will en masse make their profiles private. Not everyone will understand what is going on, but everyone with enough Facebook friends will figure out from their friends to make their profiles private. 2. The public. Public outrage is a powerful thing. Data-sharing on such an unprecedented scale would almost certainly trigger public outcry and/or boycott. People have an alternative to Facebook: G+. A boycott would not be such a big tragedy for people. Plus, you don't want your website to be known as the one that can get people fired. 3. Government. This is related to number 2. If enough people get mad, then Congress may pass laws to stop Narrative Data and similar companies from producing personal data mining products.
- intended 14y ago
  1 point by intended 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete Somewhat related experience in the past few days - A co-worker who never had known or cared about privacy, all of a sudden asked me how she could change her privacy settings on facebook. Curious as to why she did it - she said it was because of a friend of hers sent out a chain mail message asking for her to be removed. I found it ironic, that for those users most at risk of being exposed to lax privacy safeguards at FB, it was the network and social effects that were most likely to educate them in how to reduce their foot print.
gdonelli 14y ago
Shoeboxify is trying to offer a way to archive your personal and intimate memories. It is not a complete solution to the issues the article is raising, but it is an attempt. http://beta.shoeboxify.com http://beta.shoeboxify.com
enraged_camel 14y ago
A lot of people are focusing on whether the specific scenario in the article could possibly come to pass, but they are missing the big picture: the Internet is unprecedented in that it remembers everything. This is why it is a horrible idea to use online services that force you to drop your anonymity: if you put your personal information on them, then someone will mine it and use it against you at some point in your life.
michelleclsun 14y ago
I believe this is not only a Gen Y nightmare, but nightmare for all social media users that are oversharing or lack the time / energy to properly clean up their social media presence. It's hard to have a public presence to say, >1000 friends on facebook. As a user since 2005 back in college, I witness my peers and my Facebook usage evolve from 'a social network with personal sharing' to a 'bare wall with a few instagram picture uploads / article sharing, and essentially a contact list'. It's sad, but inevitable - how personal can sharing be, when the friends list is over 1000 and some of whom are no longer actively in your life? Of course no one is to blame but the user (myself) that added too many friends. However, this issue is quite common in many users that approach their 3-4th year of using facebook; less personal sharing, more 'contact collecting'. I wonder if what everyone thinks of a service that helps clean up the social media, or even more broadly, online presence of individuals. www.123people.co.uk tells you webpages/ social media accounts/ pictures/ articles about a person just by typing in first, last name and a region. With facebook recently opening up email addresses for companies to target their ads (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/). One can only imagine where our information is shared and sold to corporations. It is a shuddering thought.
noonespecial 14y ago
I've always said we won't create the first strong AI, we'll just wake it up. I hope its friendly. The selection pressures we're putting on its ancestors (to systematically weed out the people who aren't valuable to us) aren't instilling me with a great deal of confidence.
- wladimir 14y ago
  I've thought about this a bit lately. With increasing surveillance and sensors everywhere, we're feeding more and more details about human behavior into the cloud, which is stored, data-mined, compressed, various statistics are derived and used in all kinds of ways. Let's say this, over a long time, is equivalent to learning a input to output mapping of the human mind and humanity as a whole. Combined with the current focus on markets, profits and efficiency, this does not bode well. One could arrive at a complete humanity simulation (without even intending to, just to optimize stuff, there is nothing inherently evil or unfriendly). It will eventually become so good at modeling us (at least, humanity as a whole), that wasteful, inefficient, cluttered actual humans aren't needed anymore. At the same time we're becoming more and more dependent on the external information processing. There will be no terminator-like war with strong AI. We'll be unable to live without it. We'll just fade away, on autopilot, as we matter less and less, brain function after brain function better handled by computers. It's a bit of a dark future vision, at least compared to the "individual mind uploading and living forever" of the singularity optimists, but I have a hard time getting around it.
mleonhard 14y ago
I think this kind of profiling will be done on baby-boomers and gen-xers, too, using records of purchases. I believe every US store records who buys what when. This information will never be erased. It will end up being sold to aggregators who will then be able to sell the record of everything you bought since you became an adult. Even using cash will not protect you once face recognition becomes cheap. I think the only way to prevent this scenario is with legislation, as Europe is doing.
- GFischer 14y ago
  I worked for a while for the local Equifax branch, and that's basically what they do (aggregate and process data from payment records). In my country, they cannot do some profiling because of personal data protection laws (similar to Europe), but I understood that they do use information in that way in the U.S. .
loup-vaillant 14y ago
What about someone who don't use Facebook, linked-in etc? When the resume is sufficiently high in the hiring stack, the automatic online crawler could very well respond something like "no sufficient data for analysis". I would not be surprised if the blame avoider that passes for a recruiter chooses the safe route and do not hire the person.

149 points by donmcc 14y ago

justinhj 14y ago

Universal health care pretty much nullifies this threat

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Lasher 14y ago

It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!

wtvanhest 14y ago
Well, I wouldn't have hired those people regardless of their Facebook postings. Facebook just mirrors what I see in reality. If someone is so short sighted that they post things that will keep them from being hired, they are likely engaging in a number of behaviors which are not helpful to them getting hired.
- Ntrails 14y ago
  Equally, I post many things on facebook that I would not expect an employer to like - but I restrict their viewing to people I directly know. The entire scenario of a highly savvy person having a publicly viewable page that is then used against her is slightly absurd
frooxie 14y ago
I bet most people NOT on Facebook have one person in their social circle that they would not hire base on what they've seen them do in real life - people they might have considered hiring if they'd interacted on Facebook instead.
16s 14y ago
Some HN readers don't have Facebook accounts. I don't.

fiatmoney 14y ago

I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?

majormajor 14y ago
Just a few weeks ago I was checking out my feed on my phone at lunch and saw a post from an old friend I hadn't talked to in years saying he was visiting town for a few days. I sent him a message and we ended up hanging out one night that week, and we had a blast. Or, last year, there was an old friend who'd seen one of my updates pop up in her feed, and decided to send me a quick message to see what I was up to these days. We ended up talking and hanging out quite a bit, and now she's become one of my closer friends, after we had drifted out of touch for years due to moving away. Without Facebook, would we have been on each other's email list or blog or whatever non-social-network method of sharing info? Probably not. Those aren't the only things it's done for me, either -- and just two days ago I got another one of those sorts of messages, though it's too early to know if anything more than a quick "oh here's what I'm up to these days, how about you" exchange will come of it. But I think even that's worthwhile. I'm also not particularly concerned about them having cookied me and learning a bunch of sites I've visited through that. There it's mostly a numbers thing -- out of all the millions of users, I'm not too worried about someone deciding to try to hassle me with my info somehow. Compare that risk with how easy it's made it to reconnect with all those old friends. (I'll talk about the nightmare scenario of this post in a separate comment, this is just meant to illustrate the positives vs the current negatives.)
kevinnk 14y ago
The advantage for me at least is volume. In online interaction you can connect with a large number of people at once. For example, it's easy to carry a chat conversation with 2 or 3 people whereas in real life you'd need to actually have everyone in the same room, interested in the same topic, etc. Of course the trade off is usually depth (and as you mentioned, privacy) so it's not always the best thing. But it is very helpful for short updates with people you don't talk to otherwise.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

So what? Company A does not want you because of some stupid unscientific mumbo-jumbo, you just head to Company B on the other side of the street. This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe. But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.

makomk 14y ago
Then Company C decides to do business with Company A rather than Company B because Company B isn't following the latest mumbo-jumbo, and ao on...
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  So company B can do business with company D. They never liked company C much anyway.

pgroves 14y ago

I don't think this scenario could play out that way. - Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature. - The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data. - If the situation presented in the article gets even close to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee. [edit: removed meanness]

fl3tch 14y ago
That last point is interesting. There's already a burgeoning industry for companies that protect privacy, keep you off Zaba Search-type sites, etc. There are a few "reputation management" companies that try to get negative information removed or pushed down in search results. The next logical step is to just pay someone to create profiles with great content.
dm8 14y ago
For last point, there is a startup that specializes in your online reputation management. EDIT: There are lot of companies in online reputation management. Even today.
gaius 14y ago
- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends Doesn't matter if they are still accessible to FB themselves tho'!

bproctor 14y ago

I think this is a little pessimistic. If you have the capability to be able to predict a persons life, personality, etc. for the capability of hiring someone, you also have the capability to match people with their dream jobs. Ones that they would excel at.

Tooluka 14y ago

This definitely will happen. Like 100% sure. It happens right now, the beginning. And facebook won't be some magic data provider, maybe they'll supply 1-2% of all data if the company will survive for so long at all. Behavioral prediction will be Very precise. And you won't be able to anything, all endpoints will be controlled - ISP, cell operators, physical stores that sell hardware, banking, payment alternatives (bitcoin etc.). They are mostly controlled now, there is just no such precise and powerful analytical programs. This won't be end of the world or the internet. Not even close to it. Things just will be different in the future and people would accept them.

Wilya 14y ago

The hypothetical analytics company in the article scares me, because I'm pretty convinced it will exist at some point. I mean, there are already quite a lot of people who try to do it, but at some point, someone will achieve non-garbage enough results and use them to screen job or insurance applications. Or will just be good enough at marketing to convince insurance company that the results aren't garbage. It's probably fine for people who can afford to refuse a job offer based on ethical issues, but the overwhelming majority of people don't have that luxury.

michaelochurch 14y ago

LinkedIn scares me more, because I think most 22-year-olds don't really foresee that they might have the need to change their career histories. The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22. I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile but it occasionally comes in handy to have access to the people in the network. I think more people are going to be burned by consistency risk (even unintentional and non-deceptive) than by what we tend to think of as garden-variety embarrassing stuff. I also don't think anyone with data mining talent is going to work for health insurance companies doing intrusive cross-site work for less than a million per year (we're talking about work that isn't just unpleasant or boring but actually evil) and I can't see those companies paying that much. They'll hire more cheaply and get crappy work and the world will be fine.

tptacek 14y ago
It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. Meanwhile, we talk to lots of great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles; it is by no means a standard requirement. If you can't be honest to LinkedIn, just keep your profile off it. No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm, so this health insurance story about reading tea leaves out of Facebook wall posts to ding people's premiums seems far fetched.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is fraud; the other is just how people work. The problem is that, if you get caught in one of those minimal and ethically acceptable lies, or are just accidentally inconsistent, HR won't make the distinction because of the mythology that small discrepancies beget substantial whoppers. In my experience, this isn't true. Deeply unethical people are so experienced with lies that they almost never get caught in the small stuff. I don't need to lie because I'm a person of high enough social status that I don't see it useful to fake, and I'm comfortable having an online presence because I foresee that remaining true, but I have no dislike for high-caliber, low-status people who use a bit of creative revision to up their game, as long as they're not defrauding or hurting people.

majormajor 14y ago

If these companies learn everything about everyone, what happens if what they discover is that most people have their own little problems and health issues and craziness? The truly awesome people with absolutely nothing wrong with them? Good luck finding them! As far as the migraine bit goes: there are already some sorts of medical discrimination that are illegal to use for hiring in the US, though I don't know exactly what is and isn't currently allowed. But analyzing someone's FB posting to try to find out that they suffer from migraines seems like the sort of thing that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law and would quickly get shot down. And the Affordable Care Act is already taking steps towards making it illegal for insurance companies to abuse this sort of information. If you don't like the scenario in the article, keep that in mind next time you wonder about whether government regulation is ever appropriate.

DigitalJack 14y ago
As long as they don't put it in writing, there would be no case. People are not hired or fired for illegal reasons all the time. You just don't state those reasons. If it is due to blatantly obvious handicaps, that's a different story. But good luck proving you we're passed over because the employer figured out you have headaches.
- majormajor 14y ago
  So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice? There wouldn't be any whistleblowers? People would be willing to contract their HR stuff out to them? In my view, there's a pretty bright line between the described business and today's background check companies.
  - jbigelow76 14y ago
    >So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice? What are they doing that's illegal? You aren't applying for a job with them so they aren't the ones who passed you over for "somebody who's a better fit".

analyst74 14y ago

The narrative is also likely to play out this way: "Well, 9 out of 10 candidates we interviewed has some sort of health problems. Tina is great in all other fronts, I guess we'll just have to live with it." But regardless, social judgement/ranking is zero-sum game, if someone is losing out due to some social change, others are winning.

mikeash 14y ago
I disagree that it's a zero-sum game. The rankings themselves are zero-sum, but the correctness of those rankings can have huge consequences. If a change occurs which causes people who are less suited for a job to be preferred, that results in a lower global outcome.

Angostura 14y ago

The correct headline should surely be 'Gen Y's Facebook Nightmare', Facebook isn't damaged in this scenario, unless it triggers a privacy backlash.

crazygringo 14y ago

I think this just reveals bad hiring practices, more than anything else. There are 1,000 different things that can affect your productivity. Maybe her migraines cause 15% "lost productivity", but her enthusiasm causes 35% better quality work, her daydreaming cuts 10%, and her intelligence adds 20%, the fact she's stimulated by spicy food adds 5%, etc. Companies that might attempt to do this kind of micro-analysis miss the forest for a few trees, will be less competitive in the long run, and over time will die out.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago
It's even sillier than that. The performance gap between the best and worst is a factor of hundreds or even millions and the best performers are very rare and expensive. Worrying about a 15% performance loss is like finding a $100 bill and complaining that there was not a penny too. In reality, these social analysis companies will be data mining to find people far to the right on the performance bell curve. They might try to weed out the particularly crazy, but the ones you most want to weed out are masters of deception.

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10098 14y ago

I think this mostly relies on the assumption that all of Tina's posts are public. What of by 2018 people will learn to make all of their facebook posts friends-only?

jarek 14y ago
What if by 2018 "friends only" is no longer an option? Or what if the software extracts this data out of explicitly public Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin posts that were intended by the user to read neutral and employable?

dm8 14y ago

Even I breathe in the world of information management & data science, I never thought about this possibility! I for one hope this should never happen. Mining your data to do pattern matching whether your are healthy or not? Are you kidding me? We tend to forget there is something "socio technical gap" (as demonstrated by Mark Ackerman - bit.ly/UqlNLI), meaning our social world cannot to be mapped into virtual world using technology since tech is not mature. We will never be able to close the socio-technical as our brains are too complicated. I fear for our kids if this is future.

Bud 14y ago
Future? I'd be shocked if most of what is outlined in the article is not already happening NOW, in some form, if perhaps a bit less developed. And we know for a fact that Facebook data is being scanned by employers, in a mandatory fashion, and being used to screen employees: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-facebook-password-gets-teachers-aide-fired-642699 http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-...

olefoo 14y ago

Let me present a slightly more dystopian twist to this already unpleasant future scenario. In the future the pool of jobs that require a human and do not require an Olympian level of focus and dedication that few people can hope to achieve without major sponsorship is going to be quite small. In other words the job market is going to become even more of a winner take all contest, and less of a matching market. The question the hiring committee will be asking will be "Given her past history, if we hire her will she be one of the top five negotiators _in_our_industry_?" and if the answer is no... then she might not find a job at all.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

Here's an easy one somebody could write up over the weekend: You apply for a job with a resume. The resume lists the dates you worked various jobs. So you just go out and comb the social networks to find all the posting times for this person and cross-reference it with their work hours. You've just made a predictor of how much time they'll be spending on your dime trolling the net. Now perhaps that's only 1 in 20 secondary factors you look at in hiring. But I bet it's easily one of those 20.

jbigelow76 14y ago
Mobile is gonna skew that factor, if I'm at work and I tweet I do it from my phone, even if I'm sitting in front of my computer at home I'll still usually tweet from my phone just so I don't have to open another tab and nav to twitter's home page. Now if you could poll how long I spend on google reader in a given day...
pc86 14y ago
You also get into some issues with time off, vacations, etc. But I have no doubt companies (and the naive prospective employees) that have this type of access do that.

hooande 14y ago

Facebook appears to be immune from privacy concerns. No matter what they do, the average person will keep using it. So what's to stop facebook from offering a "Narrative Data" style service of their own? If facebook said, "we're going to show potential employers and insurers a report based on your activity" do you think that would be enough to get people to delete their accounts? The average college student isn't going to significantly change their behavior because of a hypothetical job offer in a vague future. Most of the people they know will also be posting party pics and talking about health issues...they aren't doing anything wrong. As other comments have pointed out, no one is perfect. Everyone has something they don't want people to know, and most of those things aren't a big deal. Even if facebook prepared and sold general reports about everyone's activity, I don't think it would cause enough harm to get people to stop using it.

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rayiner 14y ago

Who wants to start a Gen Y-focused employment discrimination firm with me?

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fruchtose 14y ago

While data mining on this scale is only barely science fiction, I don't see it progressing it this far for a number of reasons: 1. Users. Once Facebook users learn that their public data will be used for these purposes, people will en masse make their profiles private. Not everyone will understand what is going on, but everyone with enough Facebook friends will figure out from their friends to make their profiles private. 2. The public. Public outrage is a powerful thing. Data-sharing on such an unprecedented scale would almost certainly trigger public outcry and/or boycott. People have an alternative to Facebook: G+. A boycott would not be such a big tragedy for people. Plus, you don't want your website to be known as the one that can get people fired. 3. Government. This is related to number 2. If enough people get mad, then Congress may pass laws to stop Narrative Data and similar companies from producing personal data mining products.

intended 14y ago
1 point by intended 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete Somewhat related experience in the past few days - A co-worker who never had known or cared about privacy, all of a sudden asked me how she could change her privacy settings on facebook. Curious as to why she did it - she said it was because of a friend of hers sent out a chain mail message asking for her to be removed. I found it ironic, that for those users most at risk of being exposed to lax privacy safeguards at FB, it was the network and social effects that were most likely to educate them in how to reduce their foot print.

gdonelli 14y ago

Shoeboxify is trying to offer a way to archive your personal and intimate memories. It is not a complete solution to the issues the article is raising, but it is an attempt. http://beta.shoeboxify.com http://beta.shoeboxify.com

enraged_camel 14y ago

A lot of people are focusing on whether the specific scenario in the article could possibly come to pass, but they are missing the big picture: the Internet is unprecedented in that it remembers everything. This is why it is a horrible idea to use online services that force you to drop your anonymity: if you put your personal information on them, then someone will mine it and use it against you at some point in your life.

michelleclsun 14y ago

I believe this is not only a Gen Y nightmare, but nightmare for all social media users that are oversharing or lack the time / energy to properly clean up their social media presence. It's hard to have a public presence to say, >1000 friends on facebook. As a user since 2005 back in college, I witness my peers and my Facebook usage evolve from 'a social network with personal sharing' to a 'bare wall with a few instagram picture uploads / article sharing, and essentially a contact list'. It's sad, but inevitable - how personal can sharing be, when the friends list is over 1000 and some of whom are no longer actively in your life? Of course no one is to blame but the user (myself) that added too many friends. However, this issue is quite common in many users that approach their 3-4th year of using facebook; less personal sharing, more 'contact collecting'. I wonder if what everyone thinks of a service that helps clean up the social media, or even more broadly, online presence of individuals. www.123people.co.uk tells you webpages/ social media accounts/ pictures/ articles about a person just by typing in first, last name and a region. With facebook recently opening up email addresses for companies to target their ads (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/). One can only imagine where our information is shared and sold to corporations. It is a shuddering thought.

noonespecial 14y ago

I've always said we won't create the first strong AI, we'll just wake it up. I hope its friendly. The selection pressures we're putting on its ancestors (to systematically weed out the people who aren't valuable to us) aren't instilling me with a great deal of confidence.

wladimir 14y ago
I've thought about this a bit lately. With increasing surveillance and sensors everywhere, we're feeding more and more details about human behavior into the cloud, which is stored, data-mined, compressed, various statistics are derived and used in all kinds of ways. Let's say this, over a long time, is equivalent to learning a input to output mapping of the human mind and humanity as a whole. Combined with the current focus on markets, profits and efficiency, this does not bode well. One could arrive at a complete humanity simulation (without even intending to, just to optimize stuff, there is nothing inherently evil or unfriendly). It will eventually become so good at modeling us (at least, humanity as a whole), that wasteful, inefficient, cluttered actual humans aren't needed anymore. At the same time we're becoming more and more dependent on the external information processing. There will be no terminator-like war with strong AI. We'll be unable to live without it. We'll just fade away, on autopilot, as we matter less and less, brain function after brain function better handled by computers. It's a bit of a dark future vision, at least compared to the "individual mind uploading and living forever" of the singularity optimists, but I have a hard time getting around it.

mleonhard 14y ago

I think this kind of profiling will be done on baby-boomers and gen-xers, too, using records of purchases. I believe every US store records who buys what when. This information will never be erased. It will end up being sold to aggregators who will then be able to sell the record of everything you bought since you became an adult. Even using cash will not protect you once face recognition becomes cheap. I think the only way to prevent this scenario is with legislation, as Europe is doing.

GFischer 14y ago
I worked for a while for the local Equifax branch, and that's basically what they do (aggregate and process data from payment records). In my country, they cannot do some profiling because of personal data protection laws (similar to Europe), but I understood that they do use information in that way in the U.S. .

loup-vaillant 14y ago

What about someone who don't use Facebook, linked-in etc? When the resume is sufficiently high in the hiring stack, the automatic online crawler could very well respond something like "no sufficient data for analysis". I would not be surprised if the blame avoider that passes for a recruiter chooses the safe route and do not hire the person.