Post-haste, repent at leisure as we abandon privacy on social media
Like the train driver who has now been formally accused of negligent homicide in relation to the Spanish train disaster and who has stated his wish to die because of the lives lost therein.
Here is a man, not in the first or even the second flush of youth, who has been a trusted railway employee for more than two decades. It’s difficult to juxtapose that background with his apparently excessive love of speed, and even more difficult to square it with him having such a careless-and-gay attitude to social media.
A few years ago, it seems, he put on his Facebook page a photograph of the speedometer on the train he was driving. The dial showed that the train was travelling at high speed. He appended to this photograph a jocose comment about outrunning the cops: “What joy it would be to get level with the police and then go past them making their speed guns go off. Ha ha!”
Within hours of last week’s catastrophic crash, someone remembered that posting and gave the wording of the message to media. The account has been deleted.
This raises the inevitable question: If they saw that communication, back in when he posted it, why the hell didn’t they immediately send it on to the man’s employer, telling that employer to fire him?
Why didn’t they send it to the health and safety regulator in Spain? Or the police?
On the face of it, the picture was concrete evidence of the danger posed by a man in charge of a lethal weapon, who was seriously disconnected from reality and who had little or no awareness of his duty of care to passengers.
If a pilot with British Airways, Ryanair, or Delta put up some similar piece of self-incriminatory data, their tenure in the job would be unthinkable. The thing would have gone viral, if only because the sense of risk associated with flying is so much more acute than that associated with railway travel, despite the fact that, no matter how you slice the statistics, air travel is at least as safe as rail, if not safer.
It may be suggested that the picture was not necessarily incriminating. The speed it showed the train to have reached may have been acceptable on the stretch of track it was on when the photo was taken. To be nothing but scrupulously fair to the man involved, that may be the case. But if so, why did he take it at all, when he should have been concentrating on his job? And why did he suggest he might be fined if the police caught him at it?
Something has to be wrong when a loco driver reveals so much about himself and his love of speed. But of course he did it in private, to the “friends” permitted to see his page, at least one of whom remembered it, more than a year later, when the train crash put the man’s bloodied face on global media. The fact that it was remembered means that at least some of the people — his friends, remember — who read it at the time found it important enough to slot it into their personal long-term memory.
More than 90% of what we see and hear on any given day doesn’t make it into our long-term memory because the information superhighway is so cluttered that our brains have to sort at source and toss out what they don’t regard as important.
This, therefore, was registered as important, and it is arguable that it should have been passed on to his employers, in the interest of the public good.
Of course it can be proposed that a man’s private obsessions are his own business and that rewinding his past in the light of his more recent disaster is unjustified. Not so. We should not get precious and inconsistent about privacy when lives are at stake.
The fact is that for many jobs which have little direct connection with endangerment to human life, HR recruiters require candidates to undergo psychometric testing.
This, through expert analysis of information supplied — largely involuntarily through fast responses to apparently random but carefully structured questions — may show that they don’t have the capacity to lead, can’t sustain workplace relationships or can’t and won’t ever be able to do strategic thinking.
WE consider it acceptable to bypass the conscious, wilful self-presentation of job candidates in order to dip into their subconscious when considering them for management posts, but find it invasive to scan someone’s Facebook page for the same purpose. That’s contradictory.
A middle-aged man sending speed-related boasts, even to only one recipient, hangs question marks over his suitability for such high risk work. Sending it to a wide variety of people presented a legitimate opportunity to scoop up information relevant to ongoing assessment of that employee.
That didn’t happen. Nobody seems to have told this man’s employer about his public statements. And it’s unlikely that it ever occurred to his employer to trawl social media as part of its commitment to safety.
That’s likely to change. Individuals suffer from truth-leakage so badly on social media that their postings amount over time, to self-destruction. They display pictures, for example, showing themselves engaged in a fantastic array of behaviours, legal and illegal, decent and indecent, risky and safe.
In America, increasingly, commercial entities access all of the above to build up a picture of personal behaviour which, linked with cookie information and credit card data, adds up to a profile of an individual which could, for example, grievously affect the cost of their health insurance: “So three times a week you binge on KFC, your idea of a good night out is eight pints and a couple of shorts, you chain-smoke, and how’s that cocaine habit these days?”
Social media revelations, remember, currently have more than one American political aspirant caught by the short and curlies, if you’ll pardon the expression.
In Ireland, insurance companies, political parties, banks, and prospective employers can access all this material, but — at least officially — they don’t. Because we have such a respect for privacy. Except, of course, when we’re exposing ourselves (sometimes literally) in social media to a few chosen friends, working on the demonstrably flawed assumption that none of them will pass it on.
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