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Facebook photos used to judge character
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by jessica.lam | July 21, 2008 at 10:48 am
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Facebook is a great tool. Whether it is for constructive or destructive purposes it is hard to say. Not only are employers using it as a tool for weeding out potential candidates, Facebook is being used as judge of character.
Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken-driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner.
Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."
In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton's drunken-driving case.
Mr. Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partyer who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.
It's hard to even control what goes on Facebook - paranoia isn't going to cut it because just about anyone can post pictures and tag you in them. I know from experience that it's difficult enough to try and get them to delete it. I suppose the only real way to balance out the online perception of "character" is to many pictures of you doing the most publicly acceptable things.
Moral of the story? Go walk a granny across the street and film yourself and put it on Facebook.
In the limelight for all the security issues, Facebook is making changes to the privacy settings to let the users have more control over what is being broadcasted about them.
"Users should have control of their information when and where they want," said Ben Ling, the head of Facebook's platform product management. "Users should share things because they want to share them."
Facebook will offer members a cleaner and simpler set of the Web pages which make up personal profiles. These profiles, which can be organized into tabbed pages, let users share tidbits of their lives with select groups of friends or colleagues.
Posted just last week as another story on NP about Facebook.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 12:08 on July 21st, 2008
jay.el, I like this story. It's good stuff.