Reputation Management, Internet Privacy, and Social Media Quick Hits

Student Kicked Out of Honor Society for Criticizing his School on Facebook

A Florida high school student was kicked out of the National Honor Society for creating a critical Facebook page about his school. The student says that the Facebook page wasn’t malicious and that he was “frustrated that he was going to graduate from a school that was lowly ranked because of poor standardized tests scores.” The reason cited for his dismissal from NHS was that he didn’t show “loyalty” to his school. Assuming the student didn’t use the Facebook page to slander anyone, should expressing his opinions about the school make him any less worthy of honor status?

Facebook is King of Social Networking and Teens Don’t Tweet

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that 93% of youth aged 12-17 use the Internet frequently and that 73% of them use social networking websites. Interestingly, the study also shows that while more teens are social networking, they are not taking to Twitter  (only 8% use it) and are also not blogging as much (14% compared to 28% three years before). Is this a sign that teens are wising up to public sharing and trying to keep their communications within a (slightly more) private setting, such as Facebook?

For the full study, follow this link.

Sun Microsystems CEO Tweets his Resignation

Sometimes we see people get fired because of Twitter, but it’s rare to see someone quitting their job on the site. But, that’s just what Jonathan Schwartz did when he announced his resignation as Chief Executive of Sun Microsystems. Tweeting the following haiku, “Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more,” Schwartz bid his farewell to the position he has held since 2006. As we move more and more deeply into a web-based world, is this something we can expect to see more of?

Twitter Explains Phishing Attack

On Tuesday, Twitter was forced to reset the passwords of some of its users after they had become victims of a phishing attack. In this article from PCWorld, Ian Paul examines who was behind the attack and how torrenting sites (a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol) were involved. The article is somewhat technical for a layman, but it’s worth reading anyway. The big takeaway is that you shouldn’t use the same password for multiple web accounts.

Google Partnering with NSA

According to the Washington Post, Google is partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA) for help in analyzing the corporate espionage attack against the company that originated from China. Considering the sheer volume of data that Google stores, this partnership makes sense from a national defense perspective. Nevertheless, the partnership worries some privacy advocates who fear that the country’s largest intelligence agency shouldn’t be allowed too close to sensitive user information.