Month: October 2019

Posted on

I begin to understand the Europeans privacy concerns

icon-privacy-1_0.pngNot that I had that many questions about their reasoning. 

I just spent about an hour and a half cleaning up the “Subscriptions” in my Outlook.com account.

Most of these subscriptions appear to have been generated by my reading an email from one of the many offshore headhunters. I refuse to call them placement agents because they’re not actually helpful at all, and they’re not contracted placement agents for any of the companies they’re supposedly contacting me about.

What I found interesting is that each of these subscriptions was associated with a personal email address and I don’t recall doing anything but reading the email. So obviously there is some backend process running on the outlook server side of things. 

None of these subscriptions appeared in my local email clients. My computer is secure but the surprising thing is that Microsoft allows this on their servers. Oh and by the way you have to delete them all individually.

Fun NOT!

This all started because of LinkedIn. I got curious about where they were getting some of the “Suggested” contacts. How do they know who I know, if those people aren’t actually on LinkedIn? 

To answer that question I started digging. As I looked at the suggested contacts I noticed that there were many from a very old contact list. For example, there were people that I haven’t interacted with for many years. Yet there were also more current people. I realized that the list was being refreshed, but from where? 

Then as I dug around I found out that the list was being populated from my Outlook.com account. This is an email account that I use but I don’t store a current contact list there. That was when I found out that LinkedIn may not have a way to disconnect or shield your contact list from them. Once you’ve shared it, you can’t say stop. LinkedIn periodically refreshes the list presenting you with “New” potential contacts to connect with.

The problem is, what if you’re trying to protect the privacy of the people that you know. After all, if you’re interested in privacy, shouldn’t you also be concerned about the privacy of the people in your contact list?

Then I logged into Outlook.com and found the source list, I also discovered that deleting all your contacts on Outlook.com isn’t as easy as it might appear. While I could select all the contacts with one checkbox, I couldn’t select delete. de-selecting all the contacts and selecting one, or a few, would allow me to click delete. I found that I could select about 35-30 entries and delete them in bulk.

Then you have to go to the “Deleted Contacts” folder and do the deletion all over again.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the LinkedIn site to refresh and see if the contacts will be removed.

While checking around the Outlook site to find out if there was any way for me to simply disconnect LinkedIn, I stumbled upon the long list of “Subscriptions” that I don’t recall ever saying I’d like to sign up for.

By the way, LinkedIn doesn’t show up as an authorized application in Outlook’s site. So you can’t sever the connection simply from this side either.

I suppose it’s an oversight on the part of the LinkedIn folks, perhaps the Outlook folks, perhaps both

It does seem strange that there isn’t anyway to wipe or stop the personal contact list sharing.

I suppose sometime long ago when I created the LinkedIn account I must have misread the terms of sharing my contacts. I don’t think I understood that this was a permanent feature. I think, I believed it was a one time use.

I suppose this should serve as a cautionary tale.

If you’re interested in privacy, yours, or others make sure that you can revoke access to anything you’ve shared.

I think I begin to understand why the Europeans are such sticklers about maintaining control over their data.

We should be as vigilant here, but our lawmakers don’t have a clue about technology. It’s beyond them and will continue to be beyond them until they admit they don’t know technology. Hopefully at that point they’ll wise up and actually hire or appoint people with the knowledge and right skills to actually come up with a coherent policy on matters of privacy, data-sharing, and technology in general. 

That won’t be a perfect solution, but it might be a step in the right direction.

Posted on

Resume Rewrite…

I paid a resume service to rewrite my resume…

I was looking for something that would make it through all the HR filters and get me actually in front of a hiring manager so that the real discussion could begin.

The rewrite is a more standard (Un-Unique) resume. Not that my previous resume was all that flashy but it did have some elements designed to catch the eye and hopefully stand out a little. In retrospect those element were probably being lost anyway since the HR systems pretty much strip any non-standard elements making all resumes homogenous when they’re printed anyway.

The rewording of my experience and abilities is not comfortable for me. There are lots of words that are somewhat ambiguous and kind of “over the top”.  I realize that a resume is like a sales brochure but some of this is like the old days when software companies sold nothing but “vaporware”. 

“This new version of our software with its muffler bearing algorithm will increase your accounting efficiency by 1000% when properly implemented*. (Implementation is dependent on your server being more advanced than the NSA)” 

Why do we do this? Why not simply tell the truth?

I’ve got a ton of experience across a wide range of systems and topics. Obviously I’ve been around the block a few times and Generally speaking, as an older worker what I don’t know, or remember, I do know how to find or figure out.

I sent the initial copy back dripping in red-line. I paid for someone whose command of English was better than mine, so why did the initial draft need me to edit it for continuity, grammar, and word usage?

This whole resume thing is a mess anyway. We’re now writing our resumes to get past computerized filters, so that HR people can find the keywords the Hiring manager mentioned, and pass the document on to a hiring manager who is probably asking for something the HR people don’t understand in the first place.

What’s the likelihood, in this system,  that the interviewee is exactly what the interviewer is looking for? Yet HR is trying to apply exacting standards to the variability of human beings.

And as usual, the HR people really like to find your social media so they can figure out if you’re popular enough to join their team. After all we only want to hang with, or hire the cool kids right?

I’ve often thought  about creating a completely fictitious social media profile just so the HR people would have something to look at. I could do it, I’m a fiction writer after all. I haven’t because I don’t want to create and maintain a character.

In the wee hours of the night though, I’ve put the character together as a sketch that looks something like this;

  • Democrat or Bernie Sanders supporter 
  • Pro Gun control
  • Shocked and outraged that machine guns are freely available
  • Rabidly Anti Trump
  • Habitual commenter on Twitter, Facebook, and instagram. Follows the mainstream opinion, sharing outrage over the cause of the day and remarkably silent when any one of those causes happens to be disproven.
  • Social Justice warrior
  • Likes puppies and kittens, sends cutesy video clips frequently.
  • Live in a Hipster area
  • Complains bitterly about their name being misspelled on their Starbucks order. It’s Raven with a “Y” for goodness sake.

That’s just the beginning of the character, it still needs to be fleshed out.

I’ve thought that it might form a basis for an experiment. 

What would happen if you created three characters with equal qualifications and ages and the only difference between them was their social media feeds? Two characters interests overlap, differing in only, say their opinions about Trump. One is Rabid and the other isn’t actually a supporter but isn’t as much of a hater. One mentions how much they don’t like Antifa rallies and the other attends. The third character has no social media presence at all.

Would there be a measurable difference in their rate of interviews? 

If a demonstrable bias could be seen, could that bias be used to get back to a real hiring process instead of something akin to prom queen voting?

I doubt it.

Which is why I normally think about stuff like this in the wee hours of the night when I’m trying to bore myself back to sleep.

I’m thinking I’m going to tell the resume people that I’m not pleased. I don’t think I got equivalent value for the money. The more I look at this, the more it fills me with revulsion.

… improve organizational resilience, posture, and management …

Ugh!

However, I have gained a greater insight into why so many of the memos and “important notifications” at my previous company read like a poorly abridged thesaurus vomited on the page.