Israeli Draft, Facebook and Privacy
A senior officer said they had found examples of young women who had declared themselves exempt posting photographs of themselves on Facebook in immodest clothing, or eating in non-kosher restaurants.
Others were caught by responding to party invitations on Friday nights – the Jewish Sabbath. (“Israeli army uses Facebook to expose draft dodgers,” Wyre Davies, BBC)
What’s interesting to me about this story is that it illustrates how part of the cost of using Facebook is the occluded future. If you’d asked me if Facebook impacted on military draft, I’d have said no. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. And the young women in question probably didn’t think that their use of a social networking site would cause them to be drafted.
A second interesting aspect to this is that it indicates that one’s Facebook profile, in aggregate, is a religious identifier. That’s interesting because religious information is categorized specially under the Canadian privacy act (PIPED) and possibly also under European data protection laws. I haven’t seen this aspect covered in the analyses that I’ve read from those regulators. (Admittedly, I have not read all of those analyses.)