Under The Same Blue Sky

Facebook has formed a new Safety Advisory Board to make the site more secure for minors, following a growing number of threats from sex offenders on what is now the world’s largest social network.

As it has ballooned to more than 350m users, Facebook has attracted a growing number of registered sex offenders.

Earlier this year several thousand likely matches were identified on Facebook, prompting the company to suspend or remove the accounts.

“They couldn’t any longer hide the face that they were running into the same situation that every other site was,” said John Cardillo, a former New York City police officer who now runs Sentinel, a company that helps social networks identify sex offenders. Facebook is not a client of Sentinel.

Last May, Facebook struck a deal with the attorney generals of 49 states that included an agreement to find and delete the profiles of all registered sex offenders.

As part of this effort, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced that more than 3,500 registered sex offenders had been identified and removed from Facebook and MySpace as part of a new effort to police online predators.

Mr Cuomo’s office said that 2,782 registered New York sex offenders were found on Facebook, while 1,796 were found on MySpace.

“Social networking websites have become the private hunting grounds for sexual predators and they often use the safety and anonymity of the internet to groom their next victims,” said John Walsh, co-founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and host of “America’s Most Wanted”, in a statement last week.

Facebook’s new safety advisory board will consist of representatives from five leading internet safety organisations from North America and Europe – Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook said it planned to meet the board regularly to review existing safety measures and design new ways to make the site more secure. The first task for the board will be to help develop a new safety resource with educational content for parents, teachers and teenagers.

“The only way to keep kids safe online is for everyone who wants to protect them to work together,” said Elliot Schrage, vice-president of public policy at Facebook. “The formation of a board to advise specifically on safety issues is a positive, innovative and collaborative step towards creating a more robust safety environment.”

But as Facebook continues to grow – adding more than 50m users a quarter – Mr Cardillo said Facebook would have to be proactive in its efforts to keep predators off the site. “The web is a microcosm of the real world,” said Mr Cardillo. “There are sex offenders in the real world and there are sex offenders on Facebook.”

With the popularity of Facebook and LinkedIn, the curriculum vitae might seem an anachronism. However, the proliferation of recruitment websites and online business networks means your CV may be widely available already. Potential employers could even be reading it even if you are not looking for a job. That, and the relative brevity and insecurity of modern jobs, means your CV has to work harder than ever.

It’s just my career history in reverse order isn’t it?

Not any more. CVs have become much more about where you are going and what you have to offer than where you have come from. “It needs to be a shop window on who you are and show people what you have to offer,” says James Phillips, a senior consultant at The Fuller CV, a CV-writing service.

Elisabeth Marx, a partner at executive headhunters Heidrick & Struggles, says that, at a senior level, companies are looking for your major achievements: “We want to see things like successful change management, restructuring, international work, turnrounds and growing the business.”

What are common pitfalls?

You should start by being honest and not exaggerating. The growth of electronic databases means that untruths such as bumped-up academic results are easily uncovered. You should also be very careful about lesser inaccuracies, such as guessing employment dates because you can’t remember them, says Sonja Stockton, head of recruitment at PwC – even if these are honest mistakes, they may raise red flags with HR forensics.

Ms Marx says that less is more. “Sometimes we get 20-page CVs, but, even at a very senior level, they should be no more than two pages – and one page is even better.”

Mr Phillips adds that this minimalist approach should apply to the writing as well. “CVs are often highly verbose and ridden with clichés. You want to be clear and concise,” he says.

Should I write my own CV?

The argument for doing this is that you know yourself like no one else. But the arguments against are compelling, too. For instance, if you only do something once every five years, you are unlikely to be that good at it and if you spend four days struggling, you may well be better off paying someone else to do it professionally. For those looking to outsource the task, there are companies such as the aforementioned The Fuller CV and The CV House in the UK, and ResumeWriters.com and TheLadders in the US. Equally, headhunters and recruiters will often work with you to burnish your resumé. And even if you’re writing your own CV, you should seek feedback, preferably from someone who knows the professional you.

Do different countries expect different CVs?

At a senior level, says Ms Marx, there is now a fairly accepted international style. In middle management, however, there are still local idiosyncrasies, “For instance, a lot of Germans still put their photo on their CV,” she says. And, she adds, Americans, with their focus on presentation and selling, tend to construct stronger CVs.

Anything else?

Avoid silly gimmicks. At one end of the scale, this means that employers don’t want fancy fonts and descriptions of your pets under “outside interests”. And at the other end, it means resisting the urge to make video CVs like Aleksey Vayner’s infamous 2006 “Impossible is Nothing”, an application to UBS that became a YouTube phenomenon in a way Mr Vayner could never have imagined.

Google sought to alleviate the concerns of privacy campaigners yesterday by unveiling new tools that will allow users to see what information the internet company is keeping on them.

Users who have signed up for Google’s consumer services, such as Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube will be able to see a “dashboard” listing the personal details stored about them. Users will be able to edit and delete the information.

It is similar to the tools Google introduced this year to allow people to see the profile of interests it was building up about them in order to serve targeted advertising.

As Google offers people an increasing number of services from search to cloud computing, scrutiny of its privacy practices has increased.

This year a leading privacy group called on the US Federal Trade Commission to shut down Google’s web services until it could ensure better safeguards for personal data. There were mounting concerns that technical problems were making personal information on Google Docs, Google Desktop and Gmail visible to other users.

Privacy campaigners welcomed the new dashboard, launched at a conference of data protection commissioners in Madrid. “If the rest of the industry took this line, we would start to solve some of the problems with privacy,” said Simon Davies of Privacy International.

The new dashboard will not answer some of the key data protection concerns hanging over Google. It does not show the information Google collects when people use its internet search engine, which accounts for most of the company’s data.