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Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords

Here's a podcast of my last Guardian column, Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn't just about passwords:

Facebook has threatened to sue companies that force their employees to reveal their Facebook login details. As laudable as this is, I worry that it will fail to accomplish its primary objective – protecting Facebook users from employer snooping.

Increasingly, firms configure the computers and devices on their internal networks to trust "self-signed certificates". These cryptographic certificates are the same files used by your browser to establish secure, eavesdropping-proof connections to websites and to validate software updates, and to generally validate the identity of remote machines and guard the files they send you from tampering and spying.

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John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.

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3 Responses to “Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords”

1. eClipse says:

   April 16, 2012 at 8:14 am

   Or, you know, people could just "work" at work, not post thing on free public spaces that embarrasses them, and then stop worrying about this nonsense.

   The level of "don't get it" that users have
   doesn't surprise me anymore, but it does continue to amuse me.
2. Cory Doctorow says:

   April 16, 2012 at 8:34 pm

   So, if your spouse visited you at work to tell you that s/he had AIDS, or your kid had cancer, or your mom had Alzheimer's, and your employer used a hidden mic in the parking lot to listen in on you, you'd be OK with that?

   We're talking about employers who require 55+ hours a week from their employees, who expect employees to be on call all the time, and to do mandatory overtime, spying on their banking, on their private email, and on their use of health and other TLS-protected services. In secret.

   Victim blaming is ugly and cheap.
3. hal says:

   April 17, 2012 at 4:52 am

   as many have said (sheryl sandberg being the most recent) "there is no work-life balance, there is only balance". the "don't use employer resources for facebook" argument might imply the converse - if i land a deal because of a facebook connection, should my employer be denied benefit from it? the balance is not between work assets and home assets - those are the lowest value assets here. the balance is among items of high and rreperable value - {privacy, trust and security} as a cross-product with {employer, family, friends, general public} such that i can use appropriate time and materials (physical or intellectual) for each of the roles i may assume during the day - employee, manager, parent, child, supplier, customer, volunteer, friend, and way too commonly, wrangler of bureaucracy.

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