Seeking Privacy on Facebook

ABC News On Campus reporter Chelsey Delaney blogs:  Facebook. You can’t live with it, and it can never live without you and all of your information. When Facebook was an infant, it was a platform built specifically for and made available solely to college students. But this limited marketability created obstacles for expansion and progress. Now, according to Facebook, more than half of the users are  outside of college. To keep up with the Web 2.0 pace, Facebook has changed its interface numerous times, often causing its diligent users to create Facebook groups to protest itself   (for example, "I Don’t Like the New Facebook Design! I Liked the Old Facebook!"   "The New Facebook Sucks," "I Loathe the New Facebook Layout!" "1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT," and many other classics). The Facebook user has also changed, and now there are new reasons to protest. Business moguls are  using the platform to scout out individuals for jobs and then add new employees as "friends. "  It happened to me. I had to delete seven albums because one employer I worked with said that he did not hire a photographer based on her Facebook profile. All of it is very scary. And now, according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one in 10 admissions facilities at universities have glanced at high school students’ Facebook profiles to get a better grasp of character.  Of those, 38 percent reported viewing the applicant negatively. Luckily, both Facebook and my college career unfolded around the same time period. I didn’t have a Facebook in high school, or a very big online presence. Once I hit college, though, I realized that pictures of parties with my name on them doesn’t really benefit me whatsoever. So what’s the chance your keg stand might compromise your potential managerial status? You may have to make a Facebook group to find out.