Online Reputation Management Blog

Do You Need a Social Media Policy?

September 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

A Pew Research Center social networking study  (August 2011), reported that 65% of U.S. adults use social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.  Many are using these sites at work.  Some are using these sites to talk about work.  And a few are getting fired for it.

As a business owner, you basically have two choices in managing social media risk.  You can keep your fingers crossed and hope your employees don’t do or write anything stupid involving your company.  Or you can create a social media policy, support it with training, inform it with feedback, and empower employees to protect their company and brand.

Surprisingly, most U.S. companies have not taken the necessary steps to mitigate online reputation risk from their own employees. According to a Manpower report about the impact of social media in the global workplace, only 29% of U.S. companies had a social media policy.

From my perspective, the most striking data from the Manpower report was that 8% of U.S. companies have had their reputation negatively affected by employee use of social networking sites.

I don’t know the extent of the financial harm for the 8% of U.S. companies who suffered reputational damage, but I’m willing to bet that as soon as the PR crisis was over, the CEO was on the phone with her HR department asking for a social media policy.

A social media policy is not a vaccine, but it is better to set expectations and to have an open and transparent process regarding social media use by employees in and out of the workplace. Unfortunately, good judgment is relative. As a business owner, I would rather be sitting through a deposition with a social media policy in my hand, instead of a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

If your company doesn’t have a social media policy, it needs one.  If your company has a social media policy, management should take a second look – especially after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released a report about employee use of social media and employers’ social media policies.

Next week, I am going to take a closer look at the recent NLRB decisions and explain how you can use the lessons learned from these cases to create the best social media policy for your company.

Filed Under: Privacy Tagged With: , ,

Facial Recognition Technology and Online Privacy

August 9, 2011 by 3 Comments

 

Facial recognition technology refers to computer-based systems that are able to automatically detect and identify human faces.  These systems utilize a complex facial recognition algorithm. First, the facial recognition system is able to recognize a human face and isolate the face from the rest of the photograph.  The technology is able to distinguish features such as the distance between the eyes, the shape of cheek bones, nose, mouth or chin and compare these nodal points from a computerized database of pictures to find a match.  Image quality, lighting conditions and the distance and angle of the photograph will all affect the accuracy of the match, however technology is improving rapidly to compensate for these limiting factors. 

 

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint, joined by the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse recommending an investigation of Facebook’s privacy practices, in particular prohibiting the collection of users’ biometric data without affirmative opt-in consent.  With more than 750 million active users, Facebook is the most popular social network in history.  Facebook has also amassed the largest collection of photographs in the history of the world – 60 billion photographs.

 

For privacy advocates the problem is obvious. With 71% of US adults registered as Facebook users sharing more personal information in one place than at any time in history, an unparalleled repository of digital images, the technology to identify users (with or without their permission) and an estimated pre-IPO valuation of $100 billion, Facebook is the most powerful company in the world.

 

It was Facebook’s Tag Suggestion tool that got the Palo Alto company in some recent trouble.  The technology scans newly uploaded photos, searches images that have been previously uploaded to the site, then attempts to match faces and suggest name tags. When a match is made, Facebook alerts the person uploading the photos and invites them to "tag," or identify, the person in the photo.  It’s getting tougher to keep those embarrassing bachelor party pictures a secret from your wife.

 

A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently published a study whereby they were able to identify individuals on a popular online dating site where members protect their privacy through pseudonyms. In a second experiment, they identified students walking on campus — based on their profile photos on Facebook. In a third experiment, the research team predicted personal interests and, in some cases, even the Social Security numbers of the students, beginning with only a photo of their faces.

 

As facial recognition technology collides with social media, it is going to take a lot of education and maybe even regulation to protect our online privacy in the 21st century.

Filed Under: Facebook, Privacy Tagged With: , , , ,
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