• Gizmodo, Friday, July 8, 2011 11:01 AM

The subtext being online privacy, Gizmodo's Mat Honan admits to failing a "social media background check." What is a social media background check? Well, as Honan reminds us, the FTC recently gave a company named Social Intelligence the right to run background checks of individuals' Internet and social media history.

Contrary to initial reports, however, Social Intelligence doesn't store seven years worth of your social data. "Rather it looks at up to seven years of your history, and stores nothing," Honan notes. What's more, rather than scouring the Web for you in compromising, drunken states, the company actually screens for "aggressive or violent acts or assertions, unlawful activity, discriminatory activity (for example, making racist statements), and sexually explicit activity." In other words, Honan explains, "your drunken kegstand [sic] photos are probably fine as long as you're not wearing a T-shirt with a swastika or naked from the waist down."

After running background checks on six Gizmodo employees, including editor-in-chief Joe Brown, all but one came back clean, according to Honan. Guess that's one downside to writing for a Gawker-owned Web site.

Read the whole story at Gizmodo »