Facebook Feature Made For Employers

This past Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg hosted a gaggle of reporters at Facebook headquarters to announce a range of new features for the popular social networking site. Among the new features is a tool called Download My Information which allows a user to request all of the personal data, pictures, videos, wall posts, friends list and any other data related to the user that is stored on Facebook's servers. Basically, Facebook gives you access to your entire footprint on the site in a single zip file.

Download My Information is part of broader effort by Facebook to allow users more control over their personal information and privacy settings. While these efforts by Facebook may be commendable, the biggest winner in all of this might not be the Facebook users themselves but potential employers. Employers have long been interested in the online activities of prospective employees. By now anyone worth hiring has figured out to take advantage of built in privacy settings to restrict their profiles to friends. To combat this increased use of privacy settings, some employers have gone so far as to require that applicants provide usernames and passwords to any social networking sites the use as part of their application. Thanks to Facebook's Download My Information feature, employers will simply be able to require job applicants to include this complete record of their Facebook activities as part of the application process.

In a world where Download My Information profiles will soon be application requirements as ubiquitous as resumes, writing samples, and references, you have to ask whether employers ability to request such information should be legally restricted. Look at the information contained in a Facebook profile: religion, political views, sexual preference, people you associate with, etc. This is very personal information, and it would be illegal for an employer to ask you about much of this information in an interview. Congress has limited the ability to request other sensitive information. The Americans With Disabilities Act, along with other state and federal laws, restricts an employer's ability to request job applicants provide medical records. Congress and state legislatures should pass similar protections for digital information.

Some people will argue that individuals voluntarily put their information on Facebook with the intention of sharing it with others and have thus exposed it to the world. Even accepting this argument, there's a reason users start an uproar every time Facebook changes its privacy settings. People post information to Facebook accounts with the intention of sharing it only with the people they choose. Some users will make their profiles open to the world, others will set their accounts to the highest privacy settings available. People taking advantage of privacy settings restricting the flow of information shouldn't waive the right restrict access to their account information just because they disclosed it to a select group of friends.

Government Overcoming Fear of Geoengineering Taboo

The setup should sound familiar by now: humans all over the planet emitting huge plumes of particles into the atmosphere, the net effect of which causes our planet's climate to slowly change over time. Most people imagine a smokestack spewing CO2 and contributing to the problem of global warming, but for a growing number of climate scientists and policymakers the above scenario is starting to sound like part of the solution. The Washington Post recently published an article on the growing acceptance of geoengineering as a legitimate part of the climate change debate.

Geoengineering is the polar opposite of global warming. Instead of the byproduct of human production causing unintentional change to Earth's climate, geoengineering is the deliberate manipulation of the atmosphere with the express intention of altering Earth's climate. Hopefully, the end result of geoengineering efforts is to counteract our unintentional manipulation of Earth's atmosphere that is the root cause of global warming. Geoengineering efforts generally fit into two categories. The first method of geoengineering is to strip CO2 and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere using artificial means. Examples include using artificial trees and seeding the ocean with iron to promote abnormally large algae growths to sequester carbon dioxide. The second category of geoengineering methods are projects aimed at increasing Earth's albedo, or increasing how strongly Earth reflects light from the sun. Earth's albedo can be increased by dispersing reflective particles high into the atmosphere or cloud-seeding by spraying saltwater into the air.

A few things struck me as I read the WaPo article. Primarily, I was shocked how little geoengineering had been discussed and considered by the government. While some progress is being made, the government is just now considering how to study the feasibility of geoengineering. They're issuing reports on how to begin the process of creating reports on whether or not to implement a policy. That's so far removed from actually finding a solution to the problem it can't rightly be called governing at all. From the article you get the impression the the primary stumbling block for actually considering geoengineering has been the fear of lawmakers that it was taboo to suggest "playing god."

The article even suggested that geoengineering research could be quickly and efficiently integrated into existing government research projects, but that administration officials are afraid to do so without political cover because it is so controversial. Scientific research should not governed by the politics of fear and ignorance. Congress and the Executive Branch can't just bury their heads in the sand and hope this whole global warming thing blows over. The government needs to give legitimate consideration into every conceivably viable option. Even if the government doesn't come up with a coherent policy on geoengineering, the private sector will force the issue. Earlier this year, Bill Gates announced he'd allocate $5 million to fund geoengineering research. Projects funded by Mr. Gates include development of cloud-seeding machines by a San Francisco-based research group called Silver Lining. Billionaire philanthropists may be enough to get the ball rolling, but global warming is the type of problem governments exist to solve - a project needing a massive coordination of effort to bring about a solution that's in all of our best interest but beyond any of our individual capacities.

One opponent of geoengineering research, Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute, raises a novel legal question. Namely, could any geoengineering research project satisfy a federal environmental impact statement? Without Congressional intervention, laws aimed at protecting the environment at the local level could hamper future government agency efforts to save the environment on a global scale.