Exposed.

“The job-search website surveyed employers and found that 20 percent of companies admitted to checking out candidate's profiles on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace before deciding to employ them. A further 9 percent said they planned to start reviewing potential employees social-networking pages in the future.”

When I read the prompt for this weeks post my thoughts quickly trailed back to a memory from this past summer when a friend of mine was stripped of her Miss Crawford County title after her Facebook profile was exposed to the officials in charge of the pageant. As if taking her title and simply “handing it” to the runner up wasn’t enough, the local newspaper found out about the incident and immediately posted an article that briefed the situation, advertising to the public that my friend was stripped of her title for having “inappropriate photographs” (or something of that nature) posted on her Facebook profile. Furthering my thoughts, I decided to do a little research on a similar subject; that involving employers checking candidates Facebook profiles during the hiring process. The quote above was taken from an article at PCWorld, an online business center, and was of the most shocking that I stumbled upon. The whole idea, process (or whatever you may call it) is completely absurd to me. Read the article here, listen to the story of my friend who lost her title because of something that had absolutely nothing to do with how pretty or talented she was and tell me that there isn’t a line that is clearly being crossed. It blows my mind when I think about it. Obviously, I believe that we, as human beings, have lost our right to privacy in this sense; but also in more ways than just those incidents involving Facebook. I must say, however, that we only have ourselves to blame. The only way that we can lose that which we consider our true privacy is by sharing it with others. If you truly cared about what other people thought and what the consequences may be if someone knew as much about you as, for example, what’s displayed on your Facebook account, then it’s our own fault for putting it all up there in the first place. No one can take our privacy unless it’s on display in the first place; or at least is the case with Facebook. If you wanted those pictures of you drinking last weekend to be something “private” from the eyes of the public, then why did you decide to post them in the first place? Anyway, obviously I got of onto a slight tangent here with the whole Facebook dilemma and how our “privacy” can be lost in that particular sense, but as far as whether or not privacy still exists in other aspects of “real” life, I think it does. Obviously, as Americans, we are limited by our rights and the law, but I don’t necessarily think that this conflicts with our privacy. For example, the government (comparing it to the Big Brother Party at this point, since it’s the closest thing to it) controls our income and the money that we make, but they don’t control how we spend it, where we spend it, or even how much of it we spend (at least to an extent). Those decisions are private and can be made without the consent of the “party” at this point. Yet, the banking system seems like the only logical way of handling your money, which happens to involve the government or “party” in some way or another. Then again, it’s through the government that we are able to make money in the first place. So, who really knows? Perhaps the government’s role in our lives is simply accepted as part of our subconscious. It’s a scary thought, but it may just be the answer to the question posed! All in all, I do think that we are willing to give up some of our freedom (subconsciously at this point) in order to feel “safe” as a citizen of the United States. I stress subconsciously though because most of us are born here and accept our government and the “rules” for what they are, often not even thinking twice about what life would be like without the current “party”.