You will never get my Facebook password. Never.
A lot has been going around lately about employers asking job candidates for their Facebook passwords. Apparently they’d really like to be able to nose around a little, see what you’re into, who you’re friends with and such like that. I’ve never met anyone who has had this happen to them, but it doesn’t surprise me to hear that it is happening.
Employers have strange ideas about where their place is in relation to their employees. We’ve seen many cases where employers have attempted to gain access to employees’ LinkedIn profiles, their personal email accounts and more — all under the guise of protecting their business. And in nearly every case that’s been brought to court, judges have sided with employees.
See, there’s a fundamental expectation of privacy one has when using their own email, Twitter, Facebook…whatever. Yes, everything I do on any social network can be made private to the whole world. But that doesn’t mean it has to be. I choose who to share with, and when to share it.
To be honest, I have nothing on Facebook I’d be embarrassed of — and that isn’t the point. I don’t trust Facebook itself, and so I choose to refrain from sharing too much of a personal nature there. I don’t allow others to post on my wall, don’t overshare, and use it primarily for keeping track of old schoolmates. Even so, would I allow an employer to peek into it, even once?
Not a chance.
We don’t bring our personal mail in for our bosses’ perusal, do we? We don’t deliver our cellphone bills to them to look over who we’re calling. And we don’t give them audio recordings of our dinner tables at night. There’s a reason for that: It’s none of their business.
Sure, an employer may be worried about what types of things their employees post on Facebook, and if your job candidate is found to have blasted their ex-job repeatedly and publicly, it could give you pause. But courts have ruled several times that Facebook postings are protected under free-speech provisions — even if they are negative statements about the workplace.
The bottom line: If anyone asks for your password, the answer is no. Always.
The new music model
I’ve been writing songs and playing music since high school. I’ve been in several bands, and even once imagined that I’d someday be famous.
During college I played in a pretty good band. We wrote good songs, performed with heart and drew a crowd. We paid for studio time and self-released our own album. It was expensive and time consuming, but we felt as though we were headed for the big time. We started shopping our music to record labels big and small, just hoping to sign a record deal.
Time and again we were turned down. Though executives repeatedly praised our music, they weren’t willing to take a chance on us. They said we weren’t attractive enough to be marketable.
That experience left me fairly devastated. I lost faith in my music. Though I never stopped playing, I decided to stop trying to get the attention of record companies. I decided to make music for me.
Why am I telling you this?
The recording industry has long dictated what we’ll listen to. And it’s not about who makes the best music; it’s about who will sell the most records. It’s about who has the best image, who will look best on a poster and who is willing to perform exactly what the label expects. Certainly there are notable exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. As a result, our airwaves are filled with simple pop songs that, for the most part, sound the same and say the same things. It’s McMusic.
Though I gave up on record labels, I never gave up on music. My best friends and I continued to write and record songs together, and a few years ago decided we’d recorded enough songs to make an album. So we gave ourselves a name, launched a website, put out the album and have been selling it online. A few months ago, I decided to start recording my own music. I shoot video of my recording sessions and post the videos with the finished songs to YouTube. I’m by no means a star, but my videos are watched hundreds of times and I generally get good feedback.
The most interesting thing I’ve found is the incredible number of musicians who are doing essentially the same thing: creating music and circumventing the music industry, finding a niche and getting recognized for their work. The leaders in that group are Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, who play together as Pomplamoose.
Pomplamoose videos are fun to watch. Jack and Nataly are talented and attractive. They’ve gained thousands of fans and millions of video views. Jack says they’ve had plenty of interest from major labels, but they don’t want a record deal; they make their money off their YouTube ads, iTunes sales of their songs and various endorsements.
Whether Pomplamoose would have achieved notoriety without YouTube is debatable. They’re talented and attractive. Their songs are pretty good. If they were willing to play the game, I’ve no doubt the industry would embrace them, market them, make them stars. But they seem to enjoy doing things their way. They play their own instruments, do their own engineering and mixing, write their owns songs. The recording industry hates that kind of behavior.
What we’re seeing these days is a new music model — one in which listeners have more control than they’ve ever had. Thanks to the Internet, you can discover artists you’d never have heard of 10 years ago. There’s a buffet of music out there, waiting to be enjoyed at the click of a mouse. Many of these artists — me included — are writing, playing and recording their work themselves. There are no middlemen. What you hear is what the artist intends. Often you can purchase the songs you like, and the artists receive a much bigger cut of your purchase.
YouTube is filled with original artists making songs and videos, just begging for an audience. It’s time for consumers to take the power in our own hands, to listen to what we like — not just what’s on the radio. It’s time for us to explore everything that’s out there, instead of the handful of acts the recording industry allows us to hear. It’s time to start being active about our habits. You’ll find that those you support online will not only appreciate that support, but will often respond to your comments, take your suggestions, and make you an active participant in the process.
Get started now! Visit my YouTube channel or my website, where you can download my album for free. Shameless plug.
Why you should delete your Facebook account (and why I wish I could delete mine)
It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.
Let’s break it down:
Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.
We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.
That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.
On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.
I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.
Drop the Kool-Aid and run.
Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.
How I fought Viacom, and won
The Viacom vs. Google court battle is getting downright nasty. Viacom has dug up a bunch of e-mails and instant messages they claim show YouTube’s founders were purposely leaving copyrighted material online during YouTube’s early days — damning evidence against Google.
But more interesting are Google’s claims that many of those copyright-infringing videos came from Viacom itself — some of them uploaded to YouTube by Viacom employees, who were directed to put them online from places like Kinko’s, where they couldn’t be traced back to Viacom.
Already, Viacom has backed down from some of its claims, based solely on evidence that it did indeed upload its own videos to YouTube (hence, Viacom as copyright holder could not infringe on its own copyright). Now, this new accusation throws into doubt the rest of the alleged infringing works. How can Viacom prove which videos actually broke the law?
The issue boils down to this: Early on, and up to today, Viacom sees online video as a threat to its business model. But execs probably wanted to take advantage of the medium from the very beginning. By uploading videos, Viacom got two things: attention for the shows and content it was promoting and grounds for a lawsuit down the road. It got both.
Antics like this don’t surprise me at all. They just point to a crazy, disheveled slash-and-burn mentality, in which in Viacom’s collective mind it can do no wrong. It’s a mentality in which the company can willingly and unabashedly twist the law to its own advantage. And, if my personal experience is any indicator, Viacom is very likely succeeding more than anyone at this point can guess.
Nearly four years ago now I was producing a series of local spoof news videos for an online project I was getting off the ground. In one video, our crew took aim at Tom Cruise’s fight against South Park (the infamous Scientology episode). In editing the video, we used approximately 5 seconds of video from that episode, to illustrate the Cruise parody. We used no audio whatsoever.
Shortly after the video hit YouTube, it was unavailable, with a message that said it had been “removed for violating copyright.”
I was enraged. There was no proof the video violated copyright. In fact, it was a clear case of fair use. YouTube followed the letter of the law that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — once a complaint is received, the video is removed. I disagreed with the decision, but understood why it was removed. I first fought YouTube for labeling me a copyright infringer. Though the DMCA forces YouTube to removed the content, it does not mean a conviction has been won. Eventually, the note on the video said it had been “removed due to a copyright claim by Comedy Central/Viacom.”
My next step was to call the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
With a little help, I filed a counter claim, they failed to respond, and within days the video was returned to YouTube. As a lawyer at EFF told me, the video was clearly fair use.
So why was it removed?
Viacom’s policy was clearly to take down anything it didn’t like, banking on the fact that most users wouldn’t fight back. Since Viacom doesn’t actually need proof to get a video removed, it could, for all intents and purposes, remove any video it didn’t like — even if it in fact didn’t contain a single bit of infringing content.
Here’s the video, just in case you’re interested. It’s still on YouTube:
The question here isn’t just about user-generated content. It’s about our rights, and the dishonest tactics the movie, television and music industries have been employing to stifle innovation while padding their own pockets.
It’s about time this is all coming to light.
Attacking tech
I’m glad to see that we’re coming to a consensus about texting and driving. Most people these days recognize that it’s a dangerous activity — one that should be avoided at all costs. As my friend at aplaceforthoughts.com writes, Oprah is using her considerable influence to raise awareness, and many states are enacting laws to keep people from texting in the car.
Though I’m glad to see so many doing their part to stop this dangerous activity, it bugs me that texting has become such a target while many other dangerous activities are still legal behind the wheel, including eating, drinking, smoking, adjusting the radio, putting on makeup and reading. Yes, reading.
Just about everything on that list has been causing accidents since the dawn of the automobile age, and yet none of them has been outlawed. In fact, most of us are guilty of at least a few of them. Some of us are guilty of them every day. Personally, I drink coffee on the way to the office every day. I fiddle with the radio. I’ve even been known to scarf a burger or a burrito while barreling down the road.
Ever try eating a burrito in the car? Bad idea. Especially when the thing bursts all over your good shirt.
Studies have shown that eating and drinking hot beverages are more dangerous than talking on a cell phone or sending text messages. So why are we allowed to eat in the car? Why is every automobile equipped with a radio? Why are there NO warnings on car stereo systems that adjusting them while driving is hazardous?
The reason is simple: We all do these things. And it’s easier for lawmakers — many of whom are not particularly tech savvy — to condemn something they don’t understand, rather than look at the bigger picture.
And the bigger picture means we need a real “distracted driver” law — a broad law that penalizes drivers for any distracting behavior they take part in while driving. And that means everything.
The law wouldn’t have to prohibit a person from eating, drinking, or even talking on a cell phone. But in the case of an accident, the driver would be ticketed and their insurance would take a hit when it was found they were distracted.
When I worked as a crime reporter, I saw way more accidents caused by people fiddling with the radio or yelling at their kids than when people were talking on cell phones. To be fair, cell phones were a lot more rare in those days, but it doesn’t change the fact that distracted drivers have always been a danger on the roads.
Let’s all pledge to stop texting while driving. But if we’re going to make laws, let’s make sure we’re going after the behavior, not the technology.