Social media has brought a lot of change, positive and negative, in our lives. The biggest positive is is definitely the added connectivity to our friends, especially those who live faraway. Among the negatives are privacy concerns. Our social media account is, in a way, the modern version of dear diary. More or less, it is a log of who we are, what we do, our likes, dislikes, activities, and what not. The presence of so much information online has given rise to online stalkers, digital identity theft, privacy issues. Many times we find ourselves in a situation where somebody knows too much about us (mainly via social media). Of course, there are privacy settings and all, but still the problem exists.

Germany, a country keen on internet security, is about to pass a law about this very situation. This law particularly pertains to employers checking out potential employees’ profiles in the hiring process. The New York Times has an interesting article on this new German law :

The proposed law would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job-networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing, but would draw the line at purely social-networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.

What’s interesting here is the line drawn between professional online networks, and those considered social for personal purposes.  The trend suggests that some entities are finding ways to differentiate amongst these networks for the purpose of inclusion (or denial) when it comes to the enterprise.  The article went on to elaborate on German data security policy,

Germany’s Nazi-era history has made the country extremely sensitive to matters of individual privacy, and concerns have been heightened in recent years by scandals involving companies’ secret videotaping of employees, as well as intercepting their e-mails and bank data.

The explosion of Web-based information tools has added to the unease.

The German authorities are investigating Google for having collected private Internet information while doing research for its Street View mapping service, and they have asked Apple to explain its data-collection policies for the iPhone.

Facebook, which claims to have more than 500 million users worldwide, with about 10 million in Germany, has come under fire for what some observers consider privacy shortcomings; there was an uproar when the site changed its default settings to reveal more of individuals’ personal data. The German proposal, however, is aimed squarely at employers.

This is yet another way  we’re seeing a heightened level of German interest in Internet security, and will likely set some level of precedent for other countries seeking corporate and legal regulation around online outlets. This has become even more evident from actions taken by German policy makers earlier this year. For example the warning about Internet Explorer, a fine on Facebook over privacy issues, their stance regarding misuse of data collection by Google Mapping Tools, and now this.