The author writes, "Before I started looking for an apartment, I never gave much thought to the cumulative identity I had been presenting, or even performing, on the Internet. "
This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard.
I've written a post about this feeling [1], but I don't have any solution. As someone who enjoys sharing ideas through writing and meeting people online, but is also very aware of how mob-happy our online civic society has become, it is a hard position to be in.
> This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard.
Shared feeling and thought process here. Sharing in this way has been a big part of my life.
My only 'solution' has been to scrutinize every word choice to ensure maximum sharing without allowing too much exposure. It is draining but, at least for me, has becomes second nature.
I occasionally long for an anonymous/ephemeral social network that is not completely full of garbage (I.e. 4chan). I have enough Twitter followers that everything I say is subject to intense scrutiny, and that's kind of annoying. I'm tempted to throw together a quick, anonymous network targeted for tech people, but I wouldn't have time to moderate it.
I very much feel this, and it's kept me from sharing online. It's easy to imagine worst case scenario, a la Justine Sacco. My online writing has become riddled with caveats and disclaimers, pandering to the least charitable readers. Poor style, I know.
Yes, that is true, which is why wording is important. However, this article is not talking about a single post being taken out of context, it is about a systematic online persona that is affecting real life.
Except context is completely different online than in-person. Heck, online context is different for people using different devices and browsers.
In-person communication is rife with unspoken, yet understood, shared knowledge: body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, information about social standing between two individuals, etc.
Whereas we're still sorting out how to properly interact online, having only been doing it (at scale) for ~20 years.
This is probably pretty good advice for most, but I'm one of those with a dry, sarcastic, sense of humor, and that doesn't always translate well online (unless, perhaps, as a video).
I would say about a quarter of the things I type out on social media and elsewhere on the Internet don't get posted because I think about their implications and scrap the post.
How the hell do these people think that kind of behaviour is even remotely appropriate?
Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
"I don't like X unenforceable thing" is the mark of our generation. Every tweet is public, and if anyone thinks they've protected them somehow, that is both unlikely to be true in all cases and definitely is missing the point that making your tweets private is a different statement entirely.
This isn't even anything new. We used to ask for references, and we'd follow up further if the stakes were high enough. I got interviewed by a police officer from another city because my neighbor had applied to the department. Said neighbor didn't know that everyone in his life they could get a hold of would be asked questions about him, but it makes sense.
Privacy is so rarely what we think it is, and the new generations (of which I'm a part) have so very little shared understanding of the consequences of doing something publically in a world where all of it is likely recorded and shared in a nicely indexed format. The answer to this is not regulation or other bullshit feel-good answers. The answer, as it so often is, is education. I realize that is going to help very few people, but then again, regulation on something as ambiguous as this will help 0.
Except this kind of behaviour is very likely to be illegal in Germany. Sure, violation is hard to prove if it isn't blatant but this kind of regulation prevents the behaviour from becoming socially acceptable.
Case in point: try asking an employee in Germany to give you a urine sample. There are very few jobs where a legal case can be made for mandatory drug testing and even fewer where the employer is allowed to receive medical information.
It is my understanding that in the US photos on resumes are generally frowned upon and often sufficient grounds for rejection because of the high risk of anti-discrimination litigation. How can it then be acceptable for a landlord to take your social media accounts into consideration before making a decision?
Yes, public social media content is public, but the same argument can be made about anything you do in public. Yet nobody would think it acceptable to follow you around in public and take careful note of everything you do or say in the open. That the Internet makes the digital equivalent of this behaviour easier doesn't mean it becomes more appropriate.
But such ideas of basic decency and common courtesy appear to be lost on the generation that made "doxing" and revenge porn a thing.
lost on the generation that made "doxing" and revenge porn a thing
Ostensibly, "revenge porn" dates back at least to some of Hustler's columns in the 1980s. The practice of spreading pornographic images without the model's consent is doubtlessly much older.
"Doxing" is simply leaking one's personal information over the Internet. It's not like public outings have never been done before, only the medium is different this time. Doxing but only leaking to a client is basically the entire job of a private investigator, since the 19th century.
Basic decency and common courtesy were lost long before us Millennials, I'm afraid.
> "I don't like X unenforceable thing" is the mark of our generation.
A ban of this sort of thing could easily be enforced. They already prohibit discrimination, and there's already a body of precedent to help adjudicate grey areas. Make it a civil rights violation for landlords to ask for social media handles in applications. Then anyone who wants this kind of anonymity can simply avoid tying their real name to the service.
As social media posts could be used to glean protected information, I don't think it's even be that hard politically to get such a law passed in many states.
What civil right would the lessor be violating, I'm curious. I would be taken aback by being asked for social media identities, but I can't imagine what civil right asking for that would violate.
I imagine it'd be similar to banning asking for phone number or social media handles of someone you're trying to chat up for fear it could lead to harassment.
Badness can only happen with what they do with the information, not the information itself.
Can it be claimed information published on the www for everyone to see as "private"?
It's like saying my name is private. Moreover, when they do background checks they get private information on me which I would actually have to pay for even when the information is about me. I don't think its as clear cut as you make it out to be.
I don't think the people requesting her information are landlords so much as leaseholders whose home she would be subletting, and they are concerned about subletting to someone who would destroy all of their property.
Standard New York landlords who are leasing empty apartments as a business just run a credit check— they'd probably exposing themselves to problems under fair housing laws if they asked for much more.
Agreed, renting an apartment is a business (most of the time), but subletting is a personal transaction. A business cannot discriminate outside of ability to pay the requested cost for the service/product. An individual can discriminate all day long.
Where I used to live you were not a business if you had 3 or fewer rentals, but you were a business with 4+ rentals.
As someone looking for an apartment in NYC right now, who has lived here for edit: the entire time social media has existed, this has never happened to me or anyone I know. I don't think it's a "thing," as the article implies.
Edit: 26 years -> the entire time social media has existed, to please the pedantry.
Anyone who posts anything online using their real identity or anything associated to their real identity, needs to understand that it is now potentially publicly tied to them indefinitely. Do you think that when you apply for a job your employer doesn't look at your social media? The private sector uses social media data extensively when making judgment calls on individuals, and the scope of this is only getting larger.
? Do you think people who are handing you the keys to at least 100k worth of property, with 2 months rent as a deposit if that, do not want to know who they're renting to?
Because trawling your social media profiles is the only way to find out the relevant bits of information to base such a decision on? I wonder how landlords have dealt with this problem all that time before we had social media.
The words "false dichotomy" come to my mind. By your logic landlords are just handing contracts out at random if they can't stalk you online.
You're going too far in the opposite direction. It's simply another datapoint.
> I wonder how landlords have dealt with this problem all that time before we had social media.
They would ask for your previous landlords, and possibly call them for references. Maybe there was just more damage done back in those days, which is now preventable. I don't think they pay people to stalk social media for fun, there's probably a legitimate business practice behind it. Whether that improvement in their business performance is worth the loss of privacy is an open question and worth debate.
> By your logic landlords are just handing contracts out at random if they can't stalk you online.
What? They didn't say that. Don't put words into the parent's mouth. Strawmen are really poor argument opponents.
No not the only, but an accessible and easy one. And yes I've turned down prospective renters over what I found out about them online, which I wouldn't have found out 10 years ago.
'Accidental' damage is the least of my worries; most of that is insured 2 or 3 times over. A fire can happen to all sorts of people. What I worry about when selecting tenants is
- will these people keep 15 cats, despite the contract saying they can't, who will piss all over the place requiring new carpeting after they move out, or a rottweiler who will chew up all my door stiles (and good luck suing for and collecting damages from someone who doesn't have a regular income or even regular place of residence);
- will this person come home drunk, loudly, at 2am three times a week, causing the neighbors (who pay in time and never give trouble) to move out, leaving me with the vacant property for some time and the work to find another tenant;
- will this person pay in time, or will I have to call 3 times every month and even then only get paid in chunks most of the time;
- will this person stay for a while or want to move out after 4 months, despite having signed a one year lease, leaving me with the trouble and time investment.
(all of these, and more that are too specific to mention publicly, actually happened to me)
Renting out property is not a high-margin business. 'Inefficiencies' like a unit being vacant for 2 months out of the year are the difference between 'better return than savings account' and 'I should have stuffed the money in a sock under my mattress'; and that's not even counting the work you have to put into it (advertising, showing people around, chasing payment, fixing things, court sessions, ...) (OK the last few years savings accounts yield 0, I'm talking about longer terms)
What I'm trying to say is - most renters think of their landlords as fat cats to whom they have to hand over 1/3rd of their monthly income for doing nothing. The reality is much more nuanced - yes it's a business, like any other, but a highly competitive one at that (in most markets); if I was 'rich' as most of them seem to assume, I sure as hell wouldn't be dealing with the hassle of being a landlord.
I've sanitized all of my social media because, as a startup founder, the magnifying glass of "due diligence" is hovering over me at all times. The last thing I need is a problem because of something trivial.
In fact, regarding twitter, my policy is to never use it except to link to other things or retweet someone else's post. Because a 140 character statement on a complex topic is a recipe for disaster.
I find it worrying that the only people who feel safe speaking publicly on so many issues are people who profit from controversy and people with nothing to lose.
Its the soft dictatorship concept. If you want to eliminate free speech you can do with with secret police and firing squads, but a more advanced, civilized, and more importantly, cheaper, way to do it is implement intensive self censorship. Sure, you can say anything you want, as long as it offends no one on the entire internet. What little is left is no threat to those in power. How bout the weather out there?
Its like the old problem of how does an aristocracy keep itself in power? Well the expensive, crude, and unreliable method is lots of soldiers and aggressive top down force, but a more advanced, cheaper, reliable method is to propose two identical figurehead leaders with wildly varying PR campaigns and convince the public that selecting between the identical figureheads is the definition of freedom.
It's a shame to see the actual outcome of the false promises of social media. So much talking about how social networks would bring people together and help people connect and interact and give people a voice, but in the end it seems that the biggest results are that large companies have a new outlet to get eyeballs on their PR, online troughs for people to get their feed, and people have to build up even more false layers of "personal branding" around themselves, curating their eternal public record to avoid hurting their future career prospects.
Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account? (Actually I think I have three Twitter accounts, never used, and no idea what their names are.)
Or might they believe me, and think I'm too odd-stream to rent their apartment or work in their office?
Make some dead accounts. I have FB, twitter, linkedin, haven't logged into any of them in months, maybe years now. I've made three tweets in my life, all employer acceptable, one in Sept 2008 stating this is pretty boring, another a year or so ago reporting a software bug (seriously WTF this is how they accept reports?) and one more recently verifying my keybase key. The growth rate seems to be accelerating over the past seven years. It never fails to amaze me I have 11 followers none of whom I can identify (spammers I think).
They are legitimately my accounts, I just don't use their services. I have a paper list somewhere with over 220 accounts, many defunct of course. Most accounts across the entire internet are, of course, unused or empty, its not going to be unusual.
I have no twitter, no fb, no reddit, no g+, Github, and my account here is a throwaway which I regularly abandon and create a new one.
I was never asked for any of this (well, except github on job applications in the past which never been a problem when I explain them I don't have one) and if in the future I am, I probably will drop the deal (whatever it is) on the spot.
If the only way your friends reach out to you is FB, then they're probably not so much of friends. My real friends know my email, phone, IM, etc. There're plenty of ways to get in touch, if you value the person you're trying to reach.
I use email/phone if I want to do something with someone (mostly phone). There may be events like a house warming party that only gets posted to FB, but somehow that tends to reach me through someone, and if they don't, well.. not much is lost to be honest.
To be fair, most of the people I hang out with aren't that into Facebook/other or even if they are, they know I'm not there so they reach out to me/my wife over the phone.
I'm in my early 30's if it it counts for anything.
Sorta me too, except I'm in my late 50s. I'm not really friends with "a group." I'm friends with individuals, many of whom know each other or don't, and they contact me.
It's a solved problem, since before the web, and even before the internet.
Yeah, I think that may be the main difference from folks that feel disconnected when they are off FB. I have relationships with individuals (or sometimes couples), but never with 'groups'. Probably the most group thing I do is people that play tennis where I do, but again, I have their phones and whenever I want a pick up game, I just do a few calls. I love leaving my laptop/smartphone behind and just go enjoy doing something without the fear of missing something.
> Would anyone believe me if I said I don't have a Twitter or Facebook account?
I'm in a similar situation. The only social media I have is a private Twitter account that I used for about 2 days and posted basically nothing to. People in general seem to understand my choice, though that might just be my social circle. I haven't yet been in a position where I've been asked to provide social media accounts for someone to check my credibility.
Probably depends on your age and other characteristics. If you can be called a millennial, a 2013 study (http://www.emarketer.com/Articles/Print.aspx?R=1009748) found that there's over an 80% chance you use social media. That goes down each previous generation, so a baby-boomer should be expected NOT to have such things.
Also, other factors are probably relevant. "No twitter" is very different from "No twitter, because I'm married with twins."
It's important to remember that "80% chance you do X" also means "20% chance you DON'T do X". And "20%" means "1 in 5".
We like to conflate large percentages as "practically 100%" but even ".1%" just means "1 in 1000". For large groups even low percentages can represent a significant quantity.
Cycling twitter posts at top of article were very annoying and not at all what I wanted to see early in the morning. My brain is still trying to recover two minutes later. Horrible.
I'm probably in the minority and actually liked the animation - I think it represents the spastic, thoughtless, throw-away nature of (most) twitter messages.
While it seems, at least through what the author reveals, that they were in fact requesting her twitter handle for background info purposes, requests like these may not always be what they appear to be. As an example, my wife and I recently enrolled our son into an early start program. One of the initial questions in the parent info section was twitter handle. As it struck me as quite odd that a publicly funded program would request this info, I asked why and for what purpose they would need this info for. I was surprised at their response - it's their primary means of notifying parents in the event of a closure, emergency, schedule change, etc. and for misc communications. They request the parents twitter handle and follow those who have children actively enrolled (via opt-in) to enable DM's.
Unfortunately supply and demand in a place like NY is such that people will probably have to put up with nonsense like this. In other areas there would probably be a market opportunity for landlords who are only going to focus on things that are actually relevant to whether someone is going to be a good tenant or not.
Frankly I don't see what asking for someone's Twitter handle adds except for a high risk of (intentional or un) discrimination.
Who are you trying to filter out? Credit checks are likely already required so you already know their financial situation. If they're lying about anything critical, the contract likely already has that covered.
If anything, it's a tone-deaf sociopathic attempt to "get to know each other".
I've noticed the theme of "twitter as customer support" and I suspect that would be incredibly unappealing to a landlord. Being known as "that landlord on twitter with the dripping faucet" is probably not a major career goal for most landlords.
Then there's people who post pictures of property damage "So drunk I puked all over the carpet last night", perhaps with an attached pix of vodka and blue kool aide, is not going to sell well to a guy who just paid for new carpet in his rental.
And then there's pets, cat owners can't avoid posting cat pix, although "in the olden days" a quiet although banned pet might have been tolerated under a "no problem for me, no problem for you" doctrine but if half your posts are cat pix its kind of hard to consider that "keeping quiet". At the complex I lived in during my bachelor years there was some variation between what corporate thought one onsite manager would do and enforce, and what one onsite manager physically could do and enforce, and given 200 hours of theoretical work per week the manager was very libertarian WRT no complaints = not a high priority for him. But he can't CYA with corporate if some tenant insists on posting daily (banned) cat pictures. Not to mention if it came to eviction time having to explain to a judge why documented misbehavior was tolerated for months or only enforced against some pet owners (here's three twitter accounts of kittens, why is my hyperactive Shetland Sheepdog the only pet the rule is enforced against, surely its because I'm a minority)
It might help weed out some terminally stupid people who post pictures of themselves destroying their apartment, but that's hardly a guarantee that it won't get damaged. Puke on carpets happens. People put holes in walls to hang things. This is all normal stuff that every landlord should expect to have to deal with and trying to find the perfect tenant that will result in zero maintenance is a waste of time.
For the pet issue, yeah if you don't uniformly enforce the rules you have, you're going to have a bad time. That should be common sense. If pets aren't allowed, then don't allow pets. That's pretty simple. There are plenty of places that might allow small pets but not a large sheepdog and that's perfectly fine as long as its clearly spelled out in the lease.
In Germany cats are considered small pets and it is illegal for a landlord to prohibit keeping small pets in an apartment (within reason -- there is case law to help out with edge cases). It's often found in contracts but the clause is unenforceable and legally void. Dog owners always have to get explicit permission. In either case the right is null and void if the pets grossly misbehave (damage to the apartment or unacceptable noise levels that disturb the neighbours).
Due diligence aside, documented evidence only comes into play if you become aware of it. If your tenant is posting pics of a pet they're not allowed to keep in the apartment but you're not aware of the pics, no problem. If you pre-emptively ask for their social media details and then neglect to act on the information you find, sure, all blame on you.
There's an important difference between being made aware of information and actively seeking it out. Morally there's no difference between a landlord denying you an apartment because they've been shown a tweet of you bragging about doing property damage or because they were actually there and saw you do it. But there's a world of difference between either of those and intentionally rummaging through a candidate's social media presence to actively look for grounds of denial.
I dont think a lot of millennials understand the implications of posting personal thoughts or information on public websites.
I've never had any known repercussions from my posts but I know of 3 instances where people I knew have. Perhaps I dont know of an instance where I was looked over because of Social Media.
One was a person failed a class for saying "the final was so easy it was like I cheated."
Another person was denied a house to rent because they told the Landlord they didnt have dogs. Landlord checked their facebook and saw pics of his two large pitbulls.
The last person had a pic of them uploaded on Instagram while they were eating at work in uniform with their middle finger up (we worked at a restaurant). There was an investigation and person was suspended until it was finished. Luckily he didnt loose his job and was allowed to come back.
Unless I missed something, it doesn't seem like the landlords were demanding this information. Is the worry that they might not consider you if you don't answer every question?
This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard.
I've written a post about this feeling [1], but I don't have any solution. As someone who enjoys sharing ideas through writing and meeting people online, but is also very aware of how mob-happy our online civic society has become, it is a hard position to be in.
[1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2014/01/the-snarling-crowd-in-th...