I can still remember the excitement with which I created my first Facebook account over three years ago and I’m sure you can too. Back then, it was a frivolous way to associate with my friends from high school and my new friends at Cornell. Back then, I had “shooting up heroin every night” (a joke, I assure you) as one of my interests. I found it amusing at the time and, though I find it kind of silly now, stand by my decision to be young and put stupid things on my all-important Facebook. O, how naïve I was, because if I still had that up today, I might not have been able to get a job.

According to an MSNBC article from Aug. 14 which cited data from the Ponemon Institute, about 23 percent of major financial institutions use Facebook to investigate new job candidates. If candidates have inappropriate pictures or comments on their Facebook walls, they are in danger of not being hired.

In response to this, several of my friends have reduced their information on Facebook to the barebones and untagged all of their photos, regardless of how innocuous they may seem. Others have completely bolted from Facebook altogether, though they fear that even untagged photos may be one day used against them. Does this not seem extreme and slightly ludicrous?

A resume, an interview and a criminal record. For the vast majority of workplaces (perhaps excluding the ecclesial), this should be enough to fairly evaluate candidates, especially at the entry level. Why and when did a resume, interview and possible criminal record become insufficient? A person’s personal life does not affect whether he or she can crunch numbers or perform market research.

Of course, ability says nothing about how well a person will fit within in company, which is why the interview exists in the first place: to test a candidate’s compatibility within the company. Surely an interview can tell an employer more about a person than a picture of the candidate doing a keg stand at a high school party in 2002.

Workplaces investigating job candidates in this manner are just crazy. It is unthinkable to believe that Americans would forget their own rights to privacy in favor of the Internet’s free flow of information. The problem lies in the fact that we have failed to conceive the Internet as a place where privacy means something, that a password or a privacy setting does in fact connote protection.

For instance, would it be O.K. if a company, who wanted to know more about you, tapped your phone line to listen to your conservations? Or who observed you while you ate dinner with close friends in order to get a bigger and better picture of who you are? Of course not! Telephone conversations and meetings with friends are both implicitly and explicitly viewed as private interactions.

The solution is not to vacate the Internet as some of my esteemed peers have already done by deleting their Facebook accounts. As the Internet becomes more advanced, it will inevitably become an even more important part of our lives. Information about ourselves over which we have no control can be posted without our knowledge (think about that time your friend got a hold of your Facebook page and changed everything). Thus the answer lies not in reducing the information available on the Internet but upon protecting it. To this end, it is necessary for the legislature to “catch up with the times.” A privacy setting, such as “only my friends can see my information,” should mean only my friends can see my information. Laws must be passed which make it illegal for businesses to use protected information as they evaluate candidates. Period. Privacy can exist within the Internet if we are willing to let it.

Greg Wolfe is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at gwolfe@cornellsun.com. The Wolfe Man will appear alternate Fridays this semester.