
Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare - donmcc
http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/09/23/facebooks-gen-y-nightmare/
======
majormajor
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
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
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.

~~~
rdtsc
There is illegal and un-ethical. Sometimes there is a fine line but often most
people involved realize what that line is and they hang out just outside of it
without stepping over.

Imagine a meeting with HR. Company is racist. They never really made it into
an official police of course but just by joking or sort of non verbal
communication they figure out that other higher ups hate certain races. They
will talk about so and so's personality "not matching".

It is fairly easy for them to figure out an euphemism used to signal this or
that other person needs to be let go because their race isn't "right". Let's
call it "personality reasons" or say "restructuring reason". It doesn't matter
as long as it never officially put into writing.

It would be an uphill battle to successfully sue for discrimination. One would
need to compile historical data and show that people of a particular race have
been consistently not hired or laid off once hired.

~~~
gaius
Not at all far-fetched: <http://www.thestar.com/article/297666>

~~~
rdtsc
Interesting. I was just theorizing and wasn't aware of any actual recorded
cases of this, but I am not surprised.

------
pgroves
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]

~~~
gaius
_\- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends_

Doesn't matter if they are still accessible to FB themselves tho'!

------
crazygringo
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
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.

------
Lasher
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
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
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

------
olefoo
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
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
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...

------
Tooluka
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.

------
fiatmoney
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
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.)

------
Wilya
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.

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

------
guard-of-terra
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
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
So company B can do business with company D. They never liked company C much
anyway.

------
analyst74
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
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.

------
michelleclsun
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/>). One can only
imagine where our information is shared and _sold_ to corporations.

It is a shuddering thought.

------
noonespecial
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
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.

------
hooande
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.

------
mleonhard
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
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. .

------
enraged_camel
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.

------
fruchtose
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
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.

------
bproctor
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.

------
dm8
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
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-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/failing-provide-
facebook-password-gets-teachers-aide-fired-642699)

------
loup-vaillant
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.

------
gdonelli
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>

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

------
10098
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
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?

------
justinhj
Universal health care pretty much nullifies this threat

------
michaelochurch
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
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
_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.

~~~
tptacek
I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year
they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not
have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone.

Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical
things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

~~~
Apocryphon
I think the concern here is that people would edit the year they would
graduate in order to escape being excluded because of ageism, a trend which
Silicon Valley is notorious for.

~~~
m0nastic
It would seem like this doesn't actually buy you very much, because presumably
the same places that would exclude your resume because of an ageist bias,
would also pass on you after interviewing you (in which case lying about your
graduation dates just causes you to have to sit through more interviews with
places that won't hire you).

I guess the assumption is that you might be able to "win them over" in person,
assuming you get past the first interview screen?

I do find myself having to try very hard to ignore my "experience bias" when
hiring infosec folks. My first inclination after seeing a resume from someone
with "25 years of information security experience" is to cringe (Oh good, this
person has spent 20 years doing C&A's, which are fundamentally useless).

~~~
michaelochurch
_It would seem like this doesn't actually buy you very much, because
presumably the same places that would exclude your resume because of an ageist
bias, would also pass on you after interviewing you_

Disagree. If you transform your career story from VP-at-48 to VP-at-43, your
social status changes and the interview is a completely different
conversation.

Lying about actual skill is unethical, but people who are able to improve
their social status by exploiting human shallowness, in my opinion, deserve
everything they can gain in doing so.

~~~
tptacek
Can you imagine how unbelievably stupid and venal and untrustworthy you look
when it's discovered that you deliberately lied about the timeline of your
career? It's batshit that anyone would even consider it.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Whether you or I would do it or not, it's virtually guaranteed that someone
within your business circle has. Do you really care that they did?

~~~
gnaritas
I'll jump in and say yes. I'd never trust someone who lies to get ahead, and
I'd make sure they knew it. It's sad that some here seem to think honesty is
too high a bar; it's really not.

~~~
genwin
So which is it?: are you lucky enough to live in a state without sales tax, or
do you pay your state's use taxes promptly when you buy stuff online?

~~~
gnaritas
That's not even close to the same thing, whether an online retailer should
charge taxes or not is a matter between the state and the retailer to settle
and is currently up in the air; though I hear amazon will soon charge but will
also introduce same day delivery. That's nothing like lying about my history
to an employer to get a job or promotion.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The retailer does no owe sales tax to the state, you do as a citizen of that
state.

You, not the retailer, are legally obligated to report your purchases and pay
the tax.

~~~
gnaritas
I never said the retailer owed taxes to the state. And as I said, taxing
online sales is a currently hot issue and relying on voluntary compliance of
consumers isn't going to cut it and every state knows that. This is completely
irrelevant anyway, I reject any assertion that failing to pay taxes due (often
out of ignorance) on internet purchases is in any way comparable to deceiving
your employer and co-workers by lying (on purpose) about your resume to gain
social status.

~~~
genwin
You're rationalizing. It's tax evasion, a crime, regardless of ignorance. Many
states have a simple online form for it. That it's voluntary doesn't make a
difference; paying property taxes is also voluntary for people who own their
homes. These facts are highly relevant: when you're a tax scofflaw it's best
not to point fingers at those merely lying.

~~~
gnaritas
No I'm not rationalizing, I'm stating my opinion about the morality of the
issue. And you're making yet another irrelevant and bad comparison, property
taxes are generally rolled into a mortgage and you are given a bill for the
taxes due. You're grasping at straws.

~~~
genwin
People who own their homes don't have mortgages. They pay their property taxes
on their own initiative, the same as the honest people paying their use taxes.

You've stated your opinion about morality all right. You think it's okay to be
a scofflaw (definition: "a person who flouts the law, esp. by failing to
comply with a law that is difficult to enforce effectively"), even for tax
evasion. Yet you'd look down your nose at someone lying to make ends meet. Tsk
tsk!

~~~
gnaritas
No you can't move the goalpost; were talking about lying to raise social
status and get ahead, not lying to make ends meet. It's clear you're not
capable of an honest conversation, good day.

~~~
genwin
Even lying to raise social status and get ahead is better than cheating on
your taxes, according to the law.

~~~
gnaritas
Law and morals are vastly different things; sad that you confuse the two.

~~~
genwin
It's the opposite. Obama, the chief enforcer of laws in our country, said "Our
law is by definition a codification of morality." Lying is legal when society
deems the lies to be acceptable or not wrong enough. Tax evasion, however, is
considered to be morally wrong by society, hence it's illegal.

~~~
gnaritas
Still grasping at straws I see, now it's argument from authority, any more
fallacies you want to throw out. Laws are not morals, illegal does not mean
immoral nor does legal mean moral and I don't care who you quote, you're wrong
and they're wrong.

