They Are Watching You: Fear of Facebook

Here in the convivial offices of The Curmudgeon, we are a social company.  Lots of company parties and whatnot.  Many of the employees share personal information on Facebook, MySpace, & Twitter, though why anyone would want to know that Bobby threw-up the sushi he ate for lunch escapes me.

When President Obama was asked by a kid what advice he had for growing up to be President, he said be careful what you post on Facebook.  He knew what he was talking about.  Harris Interactive did a study and found that 45% of employers use social networks to check out job applicants.  Scary enough, but worse, 35% didn’t hire someone based on what they saw there.  “Holy status update,” Batman!

Your current boss may be doing it too.  Badmouthing him or the company?  Hello unemployment.  I check up on my employees.  They keep friending me (BIG MISTAKE).  I’ve only yelled at one worker though, for reporting how drunk he got in the company Irish Pub during work hours, not for getting drunk but for telling the world about it.  Just in case the authorities or somebody’s mother is reading, we confiscate keys and they are given a ride home with the car service I pay for.  (Note to self:  Hire a car service, damnit.)  Don’t you wish you worked for me?  Just use a little discretion and don’t make a habit of it.  Fine Irish whiskey is to be sipped and savored, not swigged down in some “I can hold my liquor better than you” drinking game.

But there are other pitfalls too, worse perhaps.  Burglars love the social networks, though they’re not very social.  So go ahead and tell everybody your’re going on vacation to Europe for two weeks, or you could go to the roughest bar in the city, stand up and say, “Attention everybody.  I’m going to Paris for two weeks and my house will be empty.  By the way, I live at 666 Dumbass Lane.”  One such man announced he was going to Kansas City, and then posted constant updates about it.  He came home to find his house cleaned out, including the very expensive editing equipment he used to put together videos that he posted on Facebook.  “It was like they knew what they were looking for,” he later said.  They knew what they were looking for all right.  They were looking for an idiot on Facebook.

Spouses use it during divorces.  You might have evidence of an affair, or said how hungover you were which will be used against you during the child custody phase.   “Bye kids.  The bad judge man wont let mommy keep you. He said she has a Zinfandel  problem.”

Still not convinced?  Here’s a couple that will hit you in the pocket book:  The IRS is starting to use it during tax disputes.  Cha-Ching! As they get more and more aggressive, soon they’ll probably have a computer that looks for social network information automatically, and they may be doing it already.  But wait! Order today and you also get….higher insurance premiums.  Insurance companies are pondering this move even as we speak.  Cha-Ching! More expensive homeowners insurance, coming soon to an insurance company near you.  Writing references to drinking or reckless behavior?  Cha-Ching! There goes your driver’s insurance.

Identity thieves love these sites.  I’m not going to even get into phishing and virus’s.  Just remember to be very careful with what you post.  Just ask yourself, “What evil could I do with this information,” and you’ll be alright.  Maybe.

Now that’s social networking.

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Perez Hilton Punched In Face Gets a Black Eyed Pea

By Mz. Scarlett / flickr

Here in the feisty but not combative offices of The Curmudgeon, we often find ourselves at odds with celebrity bloggers, even when it is us.  Something about our schizophrenia, and of course that people and their beliefs, there likes and dislikes, are very intricate and complicated.  The world is not written in black and white.

And so we find ourselves increasingly detesting Perez Hilton.  We didn’t like him the first time we heard the name, “Perez Hilton.”  I get it!  How genius!  It’s a play on “Paris Hilton!”  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!  That this computer worm – this virus of a human – has somehow parlayed it into an Internet phenomenon is beyond my comprehension.  This guy is so self-aggrandizing, so self-important that it is a pleasure to see him punched in the puss, by a Black Eyed Pea no less.  Too bad it wasn’t Fergie herself.

No, he was punched by Pea tour manager, Polo Molina, out side the Cobra club in Toronto after the twit argued with band members Fergie and will i. am.  He started an argument with the band inside the club.  Hilton was there with something called a Lady Gaga when will i. am told him not to write about his band on his site.  That’s all.  It was Pest Hilton who went ballistic who, according to an interview with the AP, said:

He was like ‘You need to respect me.’ He was in my face. He was obviously trying to intimidate me and scare me,” Hilton said. “I was like ‘I don’t need to respect you. I don’t respect you and I did say this, and I knew that it would be the worst thing I could possibly say to him because he was acting the way he was. I said ‘You know what, I don’t respect you and you’re gay and stop being such a faggot.'”  Now I ask you:  who was the offensive one here?

At some point, in a scuffle outside the club undoubtedly caused by Hilton, he got punched in the face by Tour Manager Molina.  Hilton then ran home crying like a little girl,  puling.  It was reported that  “Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, complained about the incident on the microblogging site Twitter. He tweeted at 4 a.m.: ‘I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke.'” (AP)   Did you catch his real name up there?  His name is Lavender.  Ha, ha, ha, ha!

So he did file a police report (whining baby) and Molina turned himself in.  The Pea must return Aug. 5th presumably to answer the charges, but I think their secretly planning on giving him a good citizen award.

I was thinking of changing my blogging name to Britain Spears.  Whaddaya think?

The next day, Hilton goes off on GLAAD for demanding Hilton apologize the Fa***t word.  Follow the story here.

(Photo Credit:  Black Eyed Peas by MzScarlett, flickr )

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Twitter Tweets Give “All Clear” To Burglars

Warner Bros.

Here in the not-so-crusty offices of The Curmudgeon, I have given the order to the staff to cease their tweets, at least any tweets that relate to this office.  Paranoid, you say?  Cautionary say I, and I’m not just whistling through my beak.

Here’s the deal:  A man posted that he and his wife were “preparing to head out of town,” and then gave updates along the way of their journey, reported Elinor Mills on CNET news.  The dude had about 2000 followers (I still don’t get why people would be interested in knowing stuff like when I’m taking a dump) so basically, he put a big sign on his front lawn reading “Gone to Kansas City.  Nobody home.  Burglars welcome!”

So when the Dude and the Mrs. Get home, they find their house burglarized, but the crooks didn’t take the normal, consumer electronics.  They took the special, hi-grade stuff, the stuff he uses when he posts shit on….drumroll please…TWITTER!  And that’s one of the reasons the whole thing looks mighty suspicious.

Loose Tweets Leave Sweets

But Crusty, you ask, how could they know where he lived and stuff like that there?  Ha, ha, my innocent  little Tweety birds, as Hamlet said, “There are more things in heaven and earth and the Internet, Tweety, than are dreamt of in your twitterosophy.”  Or something like that.  The point is, they (they being the bad dudes and chicks, you know, like Sylvester the cat) can find out anything.  Mathew Honan explains it all for you in an article in Wired magazine:

Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place–and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home.”

So that’s the theory, but would it work?  He put the theory to the test, and stalked (this is just a test) a woman taking a picture in Golden Gate park with her iPhone.  Searching the Flickr map and found one of her pics and verified it was her by looking at her photo stream.  Then he looked at her photos on the Flicker map and saw a cluster of images in one spot.  The shots were of an interior of what was likely her apartment (CNET, Elinor Mills).

If you’re a little confused by how all this works, just take my word for it that it does work and be careful what you write, post, and tweet on the Internet.

“Now I know where she lives,” he concluded in the wired article.

I’d like to thank you all for dropping by today.  Now I know where you live.

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