Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:
You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.
Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.
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Tracy W 03.11.07 at 9:15 pm
Miss Manners had a funny question once from a reader who communicated with their friends by means of publicly available blogs – and was offended by how complete strangers would comment on their blogs.
Sometimes people are just silly.
Aaron Swartz 03.11.07 at 9:41 pm
I think there’s a confusion here between blogs-as-medium and blogs-as-form. Obviously it makes as little sense to say that employers shouldn’t read things-published-using-WordPress-software as it does to say employers shouldn’t read things-written-on-recycled-paper. But this clearly isn’t what Cohen meant.
Many people are using blog software to keep a private diary, send notes to a small group of friends, and other intimate activities. Because of the limitations of the technology and people’s understanding of it, a side effect is that all this writing is available to the public. Certainly one might want to say that these people should use better technology or learn more about how to use it properly if they don’t want random strangers reading their private thoughts. But that doesn’t automatically relieve us of the ethical question of whether its appropriate to take advantage of their limitations.
The right analogy is probably not a diary, but eavedropping. Kids in malls frequently talk with their friends about fairly personal matters. (Indeed, anyone who fails to believe the statistics about first-age-of-sexual-activity ought to try this experiment.) Sure, technically anyone can listen in on their conversations. But I think it’s pretty clear that doing so and using it against them would be inappropriate.
aaron_m 03.11.07 at 9:50 pm
As I recall the debate was about a presumed student writing as an anonymous commentator on a blog that was not hers. Thus the analogy with a diary is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
There is a lot to be said, despite the social norms of hard core bloggers, for the possibility to engage in debates or discussions anonymously. This may allow for expressing ideas that seriously challenge social norms and that one would be afraid to put forth in other forums. It may allow people to participate in debates that they would otherwise be forced to abstain from because of the jobs they have, or maybe just give someone a chance to blow off steam about their professional/educational life in a way that would otherwise hurt their career.
This does not mean of course that it is generally best with anonymous debates, but only that there are real benefits to having some opportunities to express your feelings/ideas privately (i.e. in a diary) and anonymously in an interactive way (i.e. on a blog). There are also important downsides, but if someone actively tries to be anonymous on a blog maybe there are some ethical problems with trying to sabotage their attempts by identifying them and using what they say against them.
Tracy W 03.11.07 at 10:35 pm
Aaron: Certainly one might want to say that these people should use better technology or learn more about how to use it properly if they don’t want random strangers reading their private thoughts. But that doesn’t automatically relieve us of the ethical question of whether its appropriate to take advantage of their limitations.
The right analogy is probably not a diary, but eavedropping.
But logically, if the people writing blogs are not expected to be aware that they are publicly available, why are the people reading blogs meant to be aware that there is an ethical question about using the information?
To put it another way, you are arguing that:
1. People writing blogs are not responsible for realising their blogs are publicly available.
2. People reading blogs are responsible for realising that the author of the blog may not be aware that the blog is publicly available and refraining from using such information.
Your proposed ethical rule places greater obligations on the people in group 2, who have to try to see into the minds of the author of any blog they come across. I don’t see a justification for the disparate set of requirements.
You haven’t convinced me that reading a blog posted in a public manner is eavesdropping. Yes, listening in on people having a private conversation in a public place is eavesdropping – though in some situations unavoidable, eg in an elevator – but reading a public notice-board is not eavesdropping. Is a blog more like one or the other? Does a noticeboard automatically become a private conversation if anyone puts anything personal on it?
There may be a convincing ethical argument that young people should not be judged based on comments they make on their blogs when it comes to important topics like admission to university programmes – that a person’s beliefs and maturity can change drastically during early adulthood and that on the internet it is very easy to lose one’s temper with faceless adversaries, or to be drawn into an argument which is completely immoral when considered in cold blood, and that this does not imply a fatal flaw in character.
But that’s a different argument to saying that blogs are like private diaries and should not be read.
harry b 03.11.07 at 10:39 pm
In the Randy Cohen example, the prospective student is blogging under their own name, so it is a bit unlike our case. (I can get straight to the whole article through my link, but maybe its behind some paywall that I have unlocked only for myself?). Attempted anonymity is irrelevant here. I’ll think about aaron_m’s interesting comments though.
RC thinks that is analogous to a private diary. Despite Aaron swartz’s comment, this seems careless and wrong. I don’t find the eavesdropping analogy right either, though I can’t think of a really good one — mine is imperfect. The tone (of Cohen’s response) seems patronising to the prospective student. “Ah, well, they just don’t understand what they are doing, they don’t realise that what they are saying can be read by just anyone.” Well, maybe not. But it can, and they are applying to college, and many of them are putting a lot of work into making well known to admissions boards a great deal about themselves, and at 17 or 18 there are some things that you can be held accountable for, and I’m inclined to think that things you say in public and of which you make a public record fully and readily available are among them.
Gary Farber 03.11.07 at 11:47 pm
“(I can get straight to the whole article through my link, but maybe its behind some paywall that I have unlocked only for myself?).”
Cohen’s “Ethicist” slot in the Magazine has never been behind the Times paywall.
lindsey 03.12.07 at 12:01 am
As a “young adult” who happens to be applying to schools, and who happens to know many others who are as well, I feel I can shed light on the question of just how aware students are of the publicity of their online personas. I am well aware that many employers (and possibly admissions boards) have started looking up “facebook profiles” of potential candidates, and I know more than a few fellow students who have taken their profiles down before applying for jobs. Facebook, myspace, and personal blogs are clearly fair game to anyone who wants to find more information out about you. You voluntarily put the info up online, and you put it up because it will be seen by everyone. That’s the point. So arguing that the students were unaware is misleading. Perhaps they didn’t have the forethought to think that an admissions committee would see what they wrote, but they certainly put the information up knowing that it was public domain.
Personally, I don’t put anything online that I would be ashamed to have my mom see (not that she is savy enough to check it out, but as a rule of thumb). If other students put more incriminating info up, they do so in full knowledge that other people will see it. Perhaps it’s time to stop coddling kids (myself included), and start teaching them to be responsible for their actions. This is all assuming the student put up the info with their name (etc) on it. I’m more sympathetic to anonymous posts, because in that case the person’s intention really isn’t to have the public know who wrote it.
Kelly 03.12.07 at 1:11 am
Maybe Cohen needs to read Brin’s The Transparent Society, and realize that it’s not at all akin to a diary – what a hideously poor analogy. Unless someone is writing their diary in large block letters on the sound walls of the local freeway that gets clogged with 5 o’clock traffic every afternoon. That might be analogous.
What the blogging “revolution” is closest to is the old self-publishing model of pamphlets and opinions that people used to make and publish for small groups of people, and sometimes went larger than that.
And the idea of anonymous posting, in itself, is suspect. If you’re posting to a LiveJournal or other style place where you have a profile, and you include your real name, location, age, DOB, and other identifiers in the profile, you’re not really anonymous. Likewise, in the original grad school essay question, the student was posting their entire SOP/essay to a forum for feedback – while they might have been anonymous in name, it’s unlikely that someone else would steal that SOP/essay and apply to the same school(s) as the original, anonymous poster – so for all intent and purpose, the anonymous poster revealed themselves the minute they (1) posted and (2) sent in the application tying them to that anonymous post.
It’s online. It’s free for all, available to anyone curious. There should be zero presumption of privacy, and the sooner we teach people that, the better for all.
vivian 03.12.07 at 1:31 am
Hey, today on NPR Randy Cohen was asked about a woman who spent a lot of time editing/proofreading her ivy-league college daughter’s essays. His conclusion was that (a) it’s unethical to help a high school student with college essays, since high school is a competition for grades as positional goods, hoping to get into college. But (b) since (ahem) most people in college aren’t competing for grades (hunh?) or using those grades for something exotic like grad school, then having a mom who cares enough to help teach writing is a good thing, life education. As long as the mom isn’t suppressing the daughter’s voice.
Exactly backwards.
LisaMarie 03.12.07 at 1:39 am
Actually, his answer is not just about a blog. He claims you should not Google applicants at all. Apparently, you could put up a completely public website celebrating your criminal record or all the times you got away with cheating in high school, but as long as you didn’t include that on your application, it’s unethical for the college to find out via an internet search. Why not just claim it’s unethical to seek out any info that the student chooses not to put on their application?
Tracy W 03.12.07 at 1:47 am
I can think of another argument against using information from blogs in making decisions about a person. This is the risk of attributing it to the wrong person. For example, in my year at high school there were two girls who were unrelated, but shared the same surname. One’s first name was Katherine, the other’s first name was Kathryn. One was shortened to Kate for school use, but they regularly had problems with things like one would be absent from school, and would supply a note, but the absence would be attributed to Kate and the note to Kathryn in the school records so Kate would get called in about an un-excused absence (or vice-versa).
If there had been blogs or MySpace in those days it would have been easy to accidentally attribute a blog by Kate to Kathryn or vice-versa. After all, same age, same school too.
Rich B. 03.12.07 at 2:06 am
Back in the dark ages of the internet (circa 1994), I was in college, had a single e-mail address provided to me by the university, and had access to “newsgroups” (I guess they are Usenet now, but some of them were University specific, and I guess I’m not really savvy enough now to remember what I was using back then.)
It was not at all obvious to me that things I posted would later be fully searchable in Google or other search engines. Googling my old college e-mail address now, I consider myself very lucky that I only posted exceedingly silly things and not anything worse. My assumption at the time, though, was that anything I wrote would be lost in the haystack of big numbers (who would ever read post #4198 of 17,000 again)? I pity those who are not any smarter than I was thirteen years ago.
Luc 03.12.07 at 2:08 am
The diary may be a lousy analogy, but it does make a point.
The issue is ethics and intent. The assumption is that the offending texts weren’t intended as part of an application. Therefore it should be unethical to make them part of an application, if there is no overriding, and agreed upon, interest to do so.
Even when you have someone’s private diary in your hand for perfectly legitimate reasons, you still shouldn’t read it. And if you do, you should shut up about it.
That is the point. You have legit access to the information, but it is clearly not intended to be seen as part of an application. So you don’t use it. It’s about ethics, not about want you can legitimately do.
And that’s also why the analogy fits. If it is unethical it is because it is a breach of trust, a breach of the privacy I think people should be able to expect when applying to a university.
Rich B. 03.12.07 at 2:26 am
A couple of other thoughts:
When googling “Harry B.” for the application, you find several web pages:
1. Picture on John Smith’s webpage captioned “Harry B. drunk and partially undressed at the kegger.”
2. Jane Smith’s blog: “Harry B. and I were sitting around with a group of new acquaintances and the party last night, and after a few beers he regaled us with a great joke I hadn’t heard about a Jew, a Pollack, and a lesbian. It goes like this . . .”
3. Harry B’s web site, with no incriminating information, except that in a post about social democratic values, a commenter has posted, “Sure you talk big now, but what about that spirited defense of Gitmo you gave last night!” The next comment is Harry B. saying only, “This darned software won’t let me remove that comment without taking down the whole post. Please disregard it.”
Can you consider any of these in your application decision?
engels 03.12.07 at 3:24 am
Why stop at Googling your applicants? Why not go through their garbage too?
sara 03.12.07 at 4:37 am
The ideal solution would be blogging software that requires the readers to log in. More exclusive, and protected from snooping of this sort.
snuh 03.12.07 at 4:55 am
Why not just claim it’s unethical to seek out any info that the student chooses not to put on their application?
this does not strike me as a bad idea.
Tracy W 03.12.07 at 8:46 am
The assumption is that the offending texts weren’t intended as part of an application. Therefore it should be unethical to make them part of an application, if there is no overriding, and agreed upon, interest to do so.
This does not follow.
Say that someone failed to mention on their application form that they were convicted of fraud. The fraud is not part of their application. Would it therefore be unethical to consider the fraud conviction when considering the application?
What right does an applicant have to only have the positive information they chose to present considered?
Even when you have someone’s private diary in your hand for perfectly legitimate reasons, you still shouldn’t read it. And if you do, you should shut up about it.
This argument assumes the proposition – that publications on the internet are equivalent to a private diary. How about if you have someone’s letter to the editor of the local newspaper in your hand for perfectly legitimate reasons? Should you then not read it? And if you do read the letter, why should you shut up about it?
And that’s also why the analogy fits. If it is unethical it is because it is a breach of trust, a breach of the privacy I think people should be able to expect when applying to a university.
But reading something published on a website is not a breach of privacy. If a person wanted to keep something private, why did they publish it on a publicly-available website in the first place?
And I don’t see why anyone should be able to expect that when applying to a university the university will not consider publicly-available information about them.
engels 03.12.07 at 9:03 am
And I don’t see why anyone should be able to expect that when applying to a university the university will not consider publicly-available information about them.
Well, there are plenty of reasons. Firstly, the information in question might not be relevant to the decision. Secondly, gathering “publicly-available information” on a person can still be an invasion of her privacy.
It seems to me that this argument that any “publically available information” is fair game is very weak indeed. IIRC the original argument seemed to depend on somewhat tighter conditions: the information was evidence of serious misconduct and it had been “published” by the candidate (albeit with the intention of anonymity). Even so, I don’t buy it.
engels 03.12.07 at 9:11 am
Hmmm, that last part isn’t quite what I wanted to say. It should be something like:
IIRC the original arugment seemed to depend on much tighter conditions: the information was evidence of fairly serious unethical behaviour on the part of the candidate which was claimed to be relevant to her suitability for the course and it was “published” by her (albeit with the intention of anonymity). Even so, I’m not sure I buy it.
abb1 03.12.07 at 9:27 am
Engels, obviously the assumption here is that the information is relevant; if it’s not not, there’s nothing to talk about.
And second, yes, gathering of publicly-available information about can be unethical – if you’re a stalker, for example, but I don’t think it’s unethical in this case; in fact it almost seems like a responsibility of the admissions committee. See, here I applied for something and you’re responsible for accepting or denying my application. By applying, don’t I accept the possibility of any relevant and reasonable inquiries? Does googling my name really strike you as irrelevant and/or unreasonable?
engels 03.12.07 at 9:59 am
abb1 – Please look at the claim I was criticising. Your comments are not at all relevant to the point I was making.
engels 03.12.07 at 10:24 am
Also abb1 if you really think something is so obvious, perhaps you don’t need to say it?
Anyway, in case your comments have misled anyone else as to what I was arguing: firstly, the comment was addressed to the argument that any “publically available information” is fair game. Secondly, it is not “the assumption here”, nor is it “obvious” in all the issues people are bringing up that the information in question is relevant: the assumption may be that one of the parties feels it is really relevant, but that is not the same thing. Thirdly, no, “obviously” I do not think that when you place an application you do accept an open-ended “possibility” of enquiries such as internet searches being made, unless you have explicitly consented to something along these lines: that is just a restatement of the claim at issue.
engels 03.12.07 at 10:25 am
…that the information in question really is relevant: the assumption may be that one of the parties feels it is relevant…
Kelly 03.12.07 at 10:44 am
I think, though, that people are forgetting that folks on admissions committees don’t live in a vacuum – it’s not necessary that they’d have to look things up on applicants (and in the original scenario posed here, the committee members just happened to belong to the same community as someone applying to their college, and looking for so-called anonymous but not really at all anonymous help).
Seems to me that if an applicant puts the info out there – regardless of intent to stay anonymous or not – they did opt to reveal it. Someone coming across the information isn’t doing anything unethical by taking what they’ve learned and applying it.
aaron_m 03.12.07 at 11:14 am
“Seems to me that if an applicant puts the info out there – regardless of intent to stay anonymous or not – they did opt to reveal it.â€
Hun???!!!????
If a lowly graduate student (with the commonly fragile career prospects) anonymously lets it be known on a blog that a research team in their department is not being completely forthright with the FDA on some worrisome results of their medical genetic engineering research that is relevant to FDA approval but which is not part of the FDA’s information results then this student certainly has chosen to share this bit of information. But when it comes to their own identity they have clearly chosen to not ‘put it out there.’
I guarantee you that if people in this field find out who this individual is it will drastically and negatively affect their career in biomedicine. Have no illusions that this individual will be hailed and rewarded from strong scientific and ethical standards.
Is it ethical for the powers at be in universities to dig into this anonymous post so as to ‘take what they’ve learned and apply it.’
engels 03.12.07 at 11:36 am
I agree that the case is stronger where the information has intentionally been made public. But here the fact that these are opinions expressed under a pseudonym would be crucial, because this would suggest that there was no intention of making it public as information about oneself.
As for whether it can be unethical to base an admissions or employment decision on information which is to some extent predictive of the candidate’s future performance and which one acquires passively, I think the answer is clearly yes. Uncontroversial examples would be where this was based on sex or racial stereotyping, or where it could lead to nepotism (eg. by admitting positive information which would only be available on close friends; perhaps this is permissable for private companies, though). In my view the decision should be based on publically available criteria which are objectively relevant to the candidate’s fitness for the course or job in question and which also do not have objectionable social consequences (of a kind which would be tightly specified).
abb1 03.12.07 at 11:42 am
Engels,
on one extreme we don’t need any admission committee at all: applicants can punch their social security numbers into a computer system, their SAT scores and other official data are pulled from the government-certified databases, weighted, sorted – and voila, the admission process is over.
On the other extreme, if this is, say, a super-secret spy school, they might be vetted by – yes – sifting thru their trash, checking their dna samples and interviews with truth syrup injected.
It is obvious to me that a reasonable policy must exist between the extremes, a reasonable policy for a garden variety college admission.
It is my opinion that, since we do have admission committees – thus introducing the element of human judgment into the process – getting additional information off the internet is not an unreasonable course of action.
What exactly is the argument against? Yes, it might be unethical to gather public information in some cases, but how is this one of those cases? Yes, some information is irrelevant, but can you tell me that all the information is irrelevant? Yes, some members of the committee might be bad and/or stupid people and misuse the information, but this applies to all the information, including information in the application package; in this case it’s a problem with the committee rather then the source of information.
What else?
aaron_m 03.12.07 at 11:48 am
Oops “which is not part of the FDA’s information results” should read ‘which is not part of the FDA’s information requests’
engels 03.12.07 at 12:33 pm
abb1 – your example of security vetting procedures has no force on anything I said as these are conducted with the explicit consent of the applicant.
In general: apparently it wasn’t evident from my last comment but I’m really not interested in arguing with you about this, as the potential benefits, in terms of the chances of learning something I didn’t think of before, are extremely low and the potential costs, in terms of general frustration, are very high. As usual, you don’t seem to want to address the arguments I have made and you even seem to be trying to distort them. Painting a picture of two crazy extremes and then saying that the common sense right answer is “obviously” somewhere in the middle is not a serious response to what I wrote, it’s just rhetoric and it’s pretty inane. As is repeatedly insisting that your position is reasonable and repeatedly asking me, rhetorically, what my argument is. If there are some semi-coherent points buried somewhere in your post then I’m sorry, but finding them and addressing them just isn’t worth the time and effort for me.
abb1 03.12.07 at 12:42 pm
All right, maybe I didn’t read carefully. Sorry, I didn’t want to distort.
harry b 03.12.07 at 1:33 pm
Well, in response to rich b (#14) I do, in fact, think it is fine for people to take #1 and #3 into account (there’s a couple of “buts” coming, though). I’m close to certain that my name is unique among under-70 year olds, so there is no issue of identification.
The first rider is that I would expect a committee to take the evidence they glean in the whole as it were. There are issues of interpretation of any evidence, and I don’t think that any of those bits of info are damning on their own.
The second is that what one posts on one’s own site has different meaning and authority from what someone else posts about one, and the work of interpretation takes that into account. Its possible that someone is trying to sabotage the candidate, or has a grudge against them. Example #2 is clearly something that should be given no weight.
The third is that your post did give me pause, but not for the obvious reason. As regular readers know, each of the examples you give is non-existent. I have never been drunk, so #1 wiould either be a fabrication or a case of mistaken identity. Why does it give me pause, then? Well, it serves me very well to adopt a rule in which all this stuff is fair game, because I am highly unlikely to be disadvantaged by it, at least where it comes to personal stuff. Even if the internet had been around when I was 17 or so, I can’t imagine I would have posted anything very embarrassing, and the worst picture anyone would have had of me would have been one in which I had revealingly long hair. My arrest record is not something that employers who I would want to be employed by would care about. And my political views would have been publicly available no doubt, but, extreme as they were, my tendency to politeness would have been pretty clear. So, I do worry that I am insisting on a standard that suits me a bit too well.
I am amazed by the standard that we should only regard info that is on people’s applications/resumes. Don’t you guys know how many people lie on their resumes and applications? Surely it is legitimate to at least investigate that?
In response to aaron m (#26). Well, I have two takes on this. If what the lowly graduate student says is false, and intended to wreck the career of an honest scientist then, yes, I think it would be ethical to try to find out the identity of the slanderer. I think it would be unethical to do so (except to congratulate her) if the allegation were true, sure. But that is because the practice itself is unethical, and whistle-blowers on unethical practices should not be punished, not because there is any (moral) right to privacy in this case. An ethical institution would take initial steps to evaluate the claim being made in accordance with well articulated procedures, and then proceed accordingly.
Rich B. 03.12.07 at 1:56 pm
I approach the issue from the perspective of the law, and I guess my viewpoint regarding “unreasonable search and seizures” and admissible evidence in a court of law colors my opinion of what sorts of searches are appropriate — i.e., not much.
The question then, is, do you make it a policy, and how much weight do you actually give incriminating evidence?
Assumedly, if you want to permit “Googling”, you want to have that be an explicit policy of your admissions committee.
1. What is the procedure to ensure accuracy? (“In refence to your application to the Sociology PhD program, is that picture at moonyourbutt.com actually your butt, a namesake’s butt, or the butt of an application sabateur?”)
2. What’s the statute of limitations? Are freshman year posts to “gayjokes.com” relevant to grad school applications, or do we assume that the freshman grew up in the next few years and now can provide excellent insights in your Gender Studies program?
3. What is your dispute resolution system? (“That bong and chicken was totally photoshopped into the picture!”)
4. Must you google everyone to avoid selective prosecutions? (“You kept me out for that? That’s nothing compared to what you can find at joethenazi.com, and you let Joe into your program!”)
5. Can you use “spies” do access what you can’t? (“I know everything on Joe’s website is about the good work he did fighting poverty in Latin America, but in the ‘Friends Only’ section, you wouldn’t believe what he’s righting about them!”)
Regardless of the legal right, or the ethical duty, if I ran an admissions office, I’d want to have a clear policy, and the only clear policy that makes any sense in terms of enforceability is “No.”
aaron_m 03.12.07 at 2:25 pm
Harry B,
I tend to agree with your assessment of my example at #26, but my concern is that we are assessing whether or not we should respect anonymity based on some aspect of the content of what is actually said. This is not too problematic for the case I give because what we care about is the content’s truthfulness and we think that we have good ways of assessing how true the allegations are. But for other scenarios brought up on this issue things get murky quickly.
If we think of the content/anonymity link in the context or our original example of the presumed student applying to grad school some have claimed that their anonymous status is not to be respected if 1) what they say is bad and 2) is representative of their “true character.†There are the obvious problems with who decides 1 and on what criteria, but I think the epistemic problems with 2) are also serious. Do we have true characters or different characters in different social contexts? I certainly would not want my personality to be judged by my peers on just one example of a thought I had when I didn’t think they were watching.
engels 03.12.07 at 2:59 pm
Again, I didn’t say exactly what I meant in #27 as I was thinking, as I imagine we all are, primarily about methods or policies, rather than criteria, but what I wrote doesn’t seem to relate to that. So I would like to replace the final sentence with the following.
In my view the decision should be based on publicly available criteria and methods which are objectively reasonable ones for determining the candidate’s fitness for the course or job in question and which also do not have certain objectionable social consequences (of a kind which would be tightly specified).
engels 03.12.07 at 3:38 pm
Harry, I’m not sure who said that we can only take into consideration information people provide on their CVs – I’ve only said that the criteria and methods you use have to be transparent and reasonable, which I don’t think serendipitous Google searches are – but I don’t think the consideration you point to – that people may lie on their CVs – shows this view to be untenable. There would be nothing inconsistent about holding that other sources could legitimately be used to check this information’s validity, but, once that is established, they should play no part in the decision.
djw 03.12.07 at 3:59 pm
I am highly unlikely to be disadvantaged by it, at least where it comes to personal stuff.
I don’t know, Harry, I’ve known a few academics who might find the idea of a teetotaller as a colleague unnerving. Perhaps they consider long alcohol-fueled intellectual discussions at the pub to be an intregral part of academic life. Besides, what will he be like at departmental parties?
This is all in the service of a larger point, which is that while I can be ocnvinced to trust academics to judge the academic qualification of applicants. I don’t trust them (or, for that matter, myself in their position) to make judgements about what sort of personal life leads to being a good academic. In fact, I’ve noticed that my fellow academics have a host of rather idiosyncratic views about this sort of thing. Personally, I have no strong views about whether a particular act of snoopish googling of applicants is a serious ethical breach (the evesdropping analogy seems about right), but regardless, I’m rather surprised by how untroubled you are about the implications of this practice, adopted widely. People must either try harder and harder to guard any details about anything that others might find “controversial” or troubling about their personal life, or they must try, surely in vain, to adopt an entirely uncontroversial personal life, or they must abandon all sorts of possible ambitions and goals. None of these things are at all helpful to a free, open, liberal, plural society, which obviously requires more than the relevant laws to maintain. I’m aware that I’m channelling Mill here but he’s worth channelling.
I am amazed by the standard that we should only regard info that is on people’s applications/resumes. Don’t you guys know how many people lie on their resumes and applications? Surely it is legitimate to at least investigate that?
Of course not. I believe when you turn in an applicaiton, you sign a statement to say that all these things are true. A simple investigation to verify this is obviously fine, but it’s not what Cohen’s case was about, and it’s not really something people here are arguing about. Making sure I published what I said I published is obviously fine.
Which suggests that you should ask about what you think is relevant in teh application. Tracy keeps asking if it would be ok to take evidence of crimes from a google search into account. If this is an issue your department thinks is relevant, ask for disclosure about any convictions (several grad school applications did this, but others didn’t, as I recall). If you don’t believe it, run a simple criminal background check.
abb1 03.12.07 at 5:38 pm
Question to those opposing: suppose you’re planning to write a book on ethics of college admissions.
You’re a looking for a collaborator, one collaborator.
You place an ad in this thread.
You get 5 resumes.
I’m convinced that you are not going to sift thru their garbage, but is your gut telling you that you would refuse googling the applicants for all the reasons you listed?
Just curious.
Also, in this scenario, do you feel that, as #33 suggests, you need to have elaborate set of rules (like “dispute resolution system”)? In other words, when you finally choose one of the applicants, do you feel that you owe all the other applicants a satisfactory explanation, other than “sorry, I’ve chosen someone else”?
Thanks.
Steve LaBonne 03.12.07 at 5:38 pm
My academic experience (as a faculty member that is) was at a liberal arts college, where this syndrome tends to be even worse- many departments at small schools have a distinct air of clubbiness and of conformity to sometimes distinctly peculiar ideas of what constitutes the “right sort” of person to “fit in” with the club. I even have a rather unpleasant recollection of questions being raised about a candidate who was a very observant Jew, as to “problems” that supposedly might be caused by the candidate’s “unavailability” on Saturdays and holy days.
99 03.12.07 at 5:53 pm
One of the eventual problems of the “universal mind” model Google is pushing for is not a lack of privacy, but a surfeit of data.
No one has questioned the intellectual rigor of trusting myspace entries as fact. Have standards of research in colleges dipped so low that unattributed or unverified texts found via a simple text string search bear equal weight with an intentionally submitted, standardized form?
The counter-argument is that the interviewer in question did additional ‘research’ to determine that the data they found could be directly attributed to the interviewee. And we should all be pleased that an adult is seeking out personal information on a stranger who is a teen to teach them the ‘good’ lesson that everything you say or do from the time you are a sentient being is always a potential source of evidence about one’s ‘character’.
We all thought it would take George Bush to introduce the culture of Big Brother. Instead, it comes from college applications reviewers. And, inevitably, preschool applications.
I can imagine the number of Park Slope mommies who are explaining this very moment to a very confused three year old that they should be wary of what they say in public, for fear some older man is going to show great interest in that information when she is 17 or so.
harry b 03.12.07 at 6:59 pm
djw — yes, as I wrote that I thought it was a bit of a hostage to fortune. The thing about me is that now I’m middle aged and an internet user I do frequently write things, sometimes her on CT and sometimes in print, that I know will not go down at all well in some quarters in what might be my professional circles. Philosophers, I’d like to think, would only accuse me of looseness and frivolity, but I’m pretty aware that in my other discipline there are people who will find my approving comments about school choice, or accountability, or egalitarian liberalism, or whatever, sufficient reason to not want me as a colleague or a panelist, or…. I don’t care, and its easy for me not to because of the magic of tenure, though I always acted this way anyway. My point was supposed to be self-doubting, though.
I appreciate all the comments about protocols and procedures, etc, esp in the light of what 99 says above, which seems right. I wanted to say something non-commital though, about incentive effects. It might be a good thing if more people felt more need to keep more things private, no? Surely, anonymous bitching is no better for the person doing it than for anyone else. Malicious gossip? If people feel they might be held accountable for it, a decline in such behaviour might be a god (but not sufficient, certainly) reason for having a policy of allowing efforts to find people out?
Tracy W 03.12.07 at 9:41 pm
Well, there are plenty of reasons. Firstly, the information in question might not be relevant to the decision. Secondly, gathering “publicly-available information†on a person can still be an invasion of her privacy
Okay, shall we tighten this to “publicly-available information” published by the person in question?
I can see reasons why a university would feel ethically obliged not to take certain evidence into account – I gave an argument in comment 4 as to why such information should not be taken into account for student applications. DJW in comment 37 gives another argument as to why such information should not be taken into account more generally, which has some merit on its side.
But reading information a person has chosen to put up on a website that’s not intended to be password-protected is not a breach of privacy and is not analogous to reading a private diary. Or if it is, then reading a letter to a newspaper is also equally a breach of privacy.
Let us lay aside the issue of university and job applications for a while, and consider other examples. Say I was looking for a guest speaker for my tramping (hiking for non-Kiwis) club, and searched blogs around the world for someone who had exciting survival stories. Would you then say I was breaching the blog authors’ privacy?
Or say that I disagreed with what a claimed expert on multi-terminal HVDC links said, and googled him and found on that on his homepage (which showed no signs of being password protected) he made several incredibly wrong statements about electricity. Would I then be breaching his privacy by using information he’d published to discredit him?
djw 03.13.07 at 12:26 am
It might be a good thing if more people felt more need to keep more things private, no? Surely, anonymous bitching is no better for the person doing it than for anyone else. Malicious gossip? If people feel they might be held accountable for it, a decline in such behaviour might be a god (but not sufficient, certainly) reason for having a policy of allowing efforts to find people out?
Yes but Harry, you’re assuming everyone is going to punish “inappropriateness” in exactly the same way you would. I share to some degree you’re sentiment here, but others might think we should never say a peep about our feelings/emotional lives online, and punish such people accordingly. But we all know it is good for people to talk about this stuff, and if they don’t have anyone in their real lives to do it, discuraging it in online communities would clearly not be a good thing. And others might really not like gays, or conservatives, or Mormons, or people who are a bit too enthusiastic about their model trains, or what have you. People are arbitrary.
Tracy, I agree it’s a bad analogy. I suppose I was rubbed the wrong way by this post since for once in his column Cohen took a good and somewhat insightful stand along with an inapt analogy; given the frequency of those two occurances in his column the former seems more noteworthy than the latter.
w/r/t your question, Tracy, of course not. You’re looking for someone with exciting survival stories, so you’re looking for them. In the sort of case we’ve been discussing, we’ve got people who ask for applications with lots of information, but then go snooping around in (yes, public) fundamentally personal information. THere’s a reason you don’t ask for htat stuff in the application; you’d be embarrassed to do so, becuase you know it’s irrelevant. In your case you’re looking for relevant material, not contained in any application b/c you didn’t ask for one.
Luc 03.13.07 at 12:40 am
“But reading information a person has chosen to put up on a website that’s not intended to be password-protected is not a breach of privacy”
Reading the information is not the breach, it is collecting information and acting on it in a way that is not according to the intent, and not with the consent of the person supplying the personal information, that is the breach of privacy.
Of course it depends on your view of privacy, but this is not an uncommon usage.
The consequence of this usage is that you have to acquire the consent of the applicants before collecting personal information about them. And that is not exactly a high bar to set.
Tracy W 03.13.07 at 1:19 am
Reading the information is not the breach, it is collecting information and acting on it in a way that is not according to the intent, and not with the consent of the person supplying the personal information, that is the breach of privacy.
No, that isn’t a breach of privacy either. Who says that information someone makes publicly-available about themselves should only be used in a way according to the intent and with the consent of the person supplying the personal information? Such a rule would close off a lot of debate (restricting it only to people who put up ideas that they intended to be debated, and not people who intend their ideas to be taken as the gospel truth), it would reduce people’s ability to protect themselves from scammers, it would reduce people’s ability to create new and innovative knowledge built on other people’s experiences, it would reduce people’s abilities to form views about the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow human beings if those views differ from those of the person themselves.
Copyright law explicitly allows use of someone’s work without permission for the purposes of criticism or parody. This means that it’s settled law that anything you publish may be used in ways you did not intend and without your consent.
Look, I can see reasons in some situations such as university applications not to go looking for people’s postings on websites, etc. Breach of privacy ain’t one of them.
Of course it depends on your view of privacy, but this is not an uncommon usage.
No matter how many people view privacy that way it’s still a bad view.
we’ve got people who ask for applications with lots of information, but then go snooping around in (yes, public) fundamentally personal information. THere’s a reason you don’t ask for htat stuff in the application; you’d be embarrassed to do so, becuase you know it’s irrelevant.
Or you asked for the information on the application form but are not confident the applications would honestly provide it.
Ragout 03.13.07 at 3:04 am
It seems to me that the key fact here is that college applicants were recently children. If you go googling 18-year-olds, you’ll find embarrassing stuff they wrote when they were 14. I just don’t see how googling 30-year-old job applicant is analogous to googling an 18-year-old.
It’s mainly an intuition, but I do think it’s unethical to use anything about someone’s behavior at 14 to decide on college admissions. The courts don’t disclose juvenile criminal records, presumably because people change a lot in their teenage years, and shouldn’t be branded for live because of a youthful mistake. Can’t college admissions officers treat their applicants with the same deference that our society extends to youthful criminals?
engels 03.13.07 at 3:05 am
Malicious gossip? If people feel they might be held accountable for it, a decline in such behaviour might be a god (but not sufficient, certainly) reason for having a policy of allowing efforts to find people out?
Harry, your duty as admissions tutor is, possibly within certain practical constraints, to select candidates based on merit (and possibly to pursue certain limited social goals, such as diversity). It is not a license for you to pursue a personal crusade against a laundry list of social ills of your own choosing and I find it quite bizarre that you think it might be. And this reasoning takes no account of the effects of your actions on the careers of individuals, whom you would be effectively proposing to treat as means for pursuing your goals.
Let us lay aside the issue of university and job applications for a while, and consider other examples. Say I was looking for a guest speaker for my tramping (hiking for non-Kiwis) club
Tracy – I think there are, as in many of these issues, a spectrum of cases, from ones where the values of fairness and equality of opportunity predominate to others whether the value of freedom of association does. Admissions tutors clearly have duties of fairness which club secretaries and dinner party hostesses do not.
aa 03.13.07 at 3:06 am
Discuss, with reference to forks.
And hope.
Tracy W 03.13.07 at 4:08 am
Engels – I think you are making the same argument in reply to me that I made in comment 4. Or, if not the same, at least a similar one.
Luc 03.13.07 at 4:44 am
“No matter how many people view privacy that way it’s still a bad view.”
Let’s try a different angle. Here’s some quotes from an old EU document about privacy on the internet that describes the same sort of principles but as a basis for law instead of ethics.
The fact that you make something public on the internet doesn’t alter the fact that an organization that collects personal information must respect your privacy.
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Publications and directories
The Working party has reiterated that European data protection legislation applies to personal data made publicly available, and that those data still need to be protected.
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The publication of personal data on the Internet might lead to further processing of the data which the data subject might not expect. Articles 10, 11 and 14 of Directive 95/46/EC (The data protection directive) stipulate in this respect that the data subject has the right to be informed about the usage of his/her personal data.
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The data protection directive
The general directive states that personal data must be collected fairly, for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, and be processed in a fair and lawful manner in accordance with those stated purposes.
Processing must take place on legitimate grounds such as consent, contract, law or a balance of interests. Furthermore, the individual has to be informed about intended processing which also includes transmission to third parties before that transmission takes place, and given the right to object to the processing of their personal data for direct marketing purposes. The data subject must also have the right to access the data related to him/her and to rectify, erase or block these data.
harry b 03.13.07 at 10:50 am
engels and djw — the offending passage was a bit of musing, not an argument in favour, all things considered, of googling etc. Just a benefit it would produce. I buy the arguments about protocols, etc, as I said.
That said, engels, if I’m eccentric in finding such behaviour wrong, and finding it an advantage of some practice that it would inhibit it, well, that’s bizarre.
engels 03.13.07 at 4:40 pm
Harry – Sorry if that seemed rude. I don’t think there is anything eccentric about thinking that malicious gossip is wrong and I agree that in theory the fact that an action would diminish malicious gossip would be a reason in favour of that action. I just don’t think any of this provides much of a reason for visiting what I take to be potentially serious injustices on individual applicants and I don’t certainly don’t trust individual academics to do this.
Engels – I think you are making the same argument in reply to me that I made in comment 4. Or, if not the same, at least a similar one.
Sorry, Tracy, I hadn’t read all your comments. I think then that you are under a misunderstanding if you are expecting people here to argue that all individual blogs are private and should not be read by anybody. I don’t think that’s what most people are saying. The issue which matters to me is applications decisions, which Harry raised on a previous thread. If you’re looking for someone to defend Randy Cohen to the death, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong guy.
djw 03.13.07 at 6:11 pm
Harry was musing consequentialist; Engels was thinking about duties attached to particular roles. I just think you couldn’t get the arguably and potentially good consequences Harry thinks might come without some bad ones as well.
Tracy W 03.13.07 at 7:33 pm
Luc – how does the EU intend to reconcile that view on privacy with existing copyright law?
abb1 03.13.07 at 9:22 pm
I think perhaps some of this is based on misconception that college admission is some kind of competition where the best most deserving candidates should win. Well, in fact it’s nothing like that. Apart from the mandated and self-imposed pledges to not discriminate based on race, age, etc. (listed on the application), typically there is (I believe) absolutely no promise of any fairness of any kind whatsoever.
According to wikipedia:
That’s all there is to it.
Tracy W 03.14.07 at 2:00 am
Tracy, I hadn’t read all your comments. I think then that you are under a misunderstanding if you are expecting people here to argue that all individual blogs are private and should not be read by anybody.
I don’t think anyone is consciously trying to argue that. I think that some people are not aware of what their arguments about reaidng someone’s work being a breach of privacy imply about any stranger reading someone else’s blogs, or other websites.
Luc 03.14.07 at 3:51 am
“Luc – how does the EU intend to reconcile that view on privacy with existing copyright law?”
There’s nothing unusual about that. Some laws grant rights, some impose restrictions.
Privacy laws add restrictions on use of personal data. Current implementations in the EU just restrict the processing, specifically the organized, electronic processing. Thus it applies only to the admission question if the university puts the googled data in a database or other organized filing system. And it doesn’t mess with any normal fair use rights.
But the concept is clear, even if personal data is public, its use can be restricted because of privacy concerns.
And again it is not the reading of public data that is/should be restricted by privacy concerns. It is the use. So if someone has a public blog, anyone can read it. And some laws enable things that you can do with that information, and some laws restrict what you can do with that information. The same with ethics. Some things you can do with that information is perfectly ethical, some things are not.
And, most importantly, privacy concerns don’t stop when personal information has become public in one situation. If you transfer personal information to another situation, i.e. from a public blog to a college admission process, it is common to recognize that that personal information is subject to privacy concerns.
And the normal way to deal with that is to inform the person and ask for his consent and if neccesary give the opportunity to update and/or correct the information.
Somehow I do think that anyone knows there’s something amiss with googling, because I’ve heard of a lot of people doing it, but I’ve never seen it as part of a procedure, or publicly stated.
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