A CBC broadcaster filled out his Facebook profile with employment history, phone number, and gender preferences. Six months later, HR told him to delete it all. He didn't know Facebook broadcasts every change to your friends, so his deletions announced his phone number, location, and sexual orientation to his entire network.
Chapters
Everything you do on Facebook is reported. I used to work for Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC, which is sort of a combination between PBS and NPR and then no money. It's sort of the CBC. And I was an on-air quote-unquote personality. And so I signed up because I'm a nerd. When Facebook came out, you know, I put in all the information in there. And they wanted everything, right? It's like, where have you worked before? Okay. What gender do you like? What gender are you? What's your phone number? So I put all this stuff in. About 6 months later, someone at Ottawa, which is the headquarters of the CBC for human resources, calls and says, "You know, we have a policy, eh? You cannot have anything with your personal information." They didn't actually speak that way. I just find it funnier to do it that way. They said, "But, you know, if you just remove all the information, take it all off your Facebook page, then, you know, it's zippity-click, then it's all done." So I started removing information. Well, unbeknownst to me, of course, when I was putting that information into Facebook, It was reporting that to all of my friends, the hundreds of Facebook friends that I had and colleagues and all sorts of people that I was connected to, every time I put something in and every time I took something out. So I was putting all this information in, it was reporting it to my friends, you know, Tod Maffin is in Vancouver, Tod Maffin is a male, and as I was taking this all out, Facebook reported, because I'm pulling the information off, Tod Maffin no longer has a phone number. And then it says, and announces this to all of my Facebook friends, "Tod Maffin is no longer interested in women." Well.
