German Lawmakers Seek To Limit Usage of Social Media Info By Employers

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

Germany seems to take privacy pretty seriously.

According to reports this week Germany is seeking to enact legislation that would restrict the usage of information about prospective employees garnered from social media sites by employers. The legislators are drawing a line between “pure” social networking site and the more professional ones.

“The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière”

No idea how they’ll classify Twitter or FourSquare .. though I can see FourSquare being used to keep track of supposedly sick staff … .. Or am I just cynical?

Full story here

Over 100k Irish Twitter User Accounts

Looks like the Irish media (both online and offline) are all excited about the latest useless statistic

Seemingly there are over 100 thousand Irish Twitter “users”. How they reached that figure is beyond me.. Probably based on what the users have stated in their location. Or maybe Twitter have provided data?

In any case it’s a meaningless figure, as so many of the accounts are either completely dormant, abandoned or have so little activity that they might as well not be there…

Twifficiency Shows How NOT To Use Twitter’s OAuth

Twitter, in common with other social networking sites and services, has an authentication system. In Twitter’s case it’s called OAuth and it allows you, as a user, to give applications and service access to your account. For an application or service to function correctly it might need to gather information from your Twitter stream. Maybe it needs to see who you follow and who follows you etc., etc., etc.

All quite innocent and boring really.

However some applications are badly written – either intentionally or accidentally, and you can easily end up giving a 3rd party far too much acess to your account.

In the case of Twifficiency as soon as you login via OAuth it will send a “tweet” to all your followers saying:

My Twifficiency score is xx%. Whats yours? http://twifficiency.com/

So basically publicising itself.

Needless to say it doesn’t ask you before it does this nor does it give you any warning or indication that it’s about to do it, so it basically spams your followers

The developer, meanwhile, is denying he did this intentionally (you’d think he’d have checked .. .. )

So what can you, as a user, do?

Change your settings and avoid badly coded services like Twifficiency.

UPDATE: The “service” now has a checkbox on its main screen allowing people to opt out of the automated tweeting of their “score”