What My Landlord Learned About Me from Twitter
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is completely the opposite of my (also a millennial) experience. I blog on a regular basis, post things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, what have you. The amount of thought that goes into each post ("could this be misconstrued by an employer?" "if I post this, will it offend one of my friends?" "Could this retweet become viral?") is paralyzing and exhausting, but not sharing is just as hard.
I've written a post about this feeling [1], but I don't have any solution. As someone who enjoys sharing ideas through writing and meeting people online, but is also very aware of how mob-happy our online civic society has become, it is a hard position to be in.
[1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2014/01/the-snarling-crowd-in-th...
In-person communication is rife with unspoken, yet understood, shared knowledge: body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, information about social standing between two individuals, etc.
Whereas we're still sorting out how to properly interact online, having only been doing it (at scale) for ~20 years.
Shared feeling and thought process here. Sharing in this way has been a big part of my life.
My only 'solution' has been to scrutinize every word choice to ensure maximum sharing without allowing too much exposure. It is draining but, at least for me, has becomes second nature.
Maybe it's just German privacy laws speaking, but I find the idea of a landlord asking for your Twitter handle (or stalking you on Facebook) appalling.
This isn't even anything new. We used to ask for references, and we'd follow up further if the stakes were high enough. I got interviewed by a police officer from another city because my neighbor had applied to the department. Said neighbor didn't know that everyone in his life they could get a hold of would be asked questions about him, but it makes sense.
Privacy is so rarely what we think it is, and the new generations (of which I'm a part) have so very little shared understanding of the consequences of doing something publically in a world where all of it is likely recorded and shared in a nicely indexed format. The answer to this is not regulation or other bullshit feel-good answers. The answer, as it so often is, is education. I realize that is going to help very few people, but then again, regulation on something as ambiguous as this will help 0.
Case in point: try asking an employee in Germany to give you a urine sample. There are very few jobs where a legal case can be made for mandatory drug testing and even fewer where the employer is allowed to receive medical information.
It is my understanding that in the US photos on resumes are generally frowned upon and often sufficient grounds for rejection because of the high risk of anti-discrimination litigation. How can it then be acceptable for a landlord to take your social media accounts into consideration before making a decision?
Yes, public social media content is public, but the same argument can be made about anything you do in public. Yet nobody would think it acceptable to follow you around in public and take careful note of everything you do or say in the open. That the Internet makes the digital equivalent of this behaviour easier doesn't mean it becomes more appropriate.
But such ideas of basic decency and common courtesy appear to be lost on the generation that made "doxing" and revenge porn a thing.
Ostensibly, "revenge porn" dates back at least to some of Hustler's columns in the 1980s. The practice of spreading pornographic images without the model's consent is doubtlessly much older.
"Doxing" is simply leaking one's personal information over the Internet. It's not like public outings have never been done before, only the medium is different this time. Doxing but only leaking to a client is basically the entire job of a private investigator, since the 19th century.
Basic decency and common courtesy were lost long before us Millennials, I'm afraid.
A ban of this sort of thing could easily be enforced. They already prohibit discrimination, and there's already a body of precedent to help adjudicate grey areas. Make it a civil rights violation for landlords to ask for social media handles in applications. Then anyone who wants this kind of anonymity can simply avoid tying their real name to the service.
As social media posts could be used to glean protected information, I don't think it's even be that hard politically to get such a law passed in many states.
I imagine it'd be similar to banning asking for phone number or social media handles of someone you're trying to chat up for fear it could lead to harassment.
Badness can only happen with what they do with the information, not the information itself.
Privacy?
It's like saying my name is private. Moreover, when they do background checks they get private information on me which I would actually have to pay for even when the information is about me. I don't think its as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Though I don't think in this case not having a Twitter account would cause you to be unable to rent in NYC. She could have simply said she didn't have one. Not sure if that would make you legally culpable or not.
> I don't think its as clear cut as you make it out to be.
I don't mean to be rude, but these kinds of questions are exactly what the judicial system and the body of civil rights law and precedent are aimed at answering. We pass the law, then it's the judicial system's job to work out the particulars by adjudicating individual cases. It's the whole reason they exist.
On the other hand, when they do a background check, any competent service is going to find that information for the lessor anyway. I don't see a difference in result.
Of course I dont like the idea of using people's online personae as helping decide whether they are tenant worthy or not.
The words "false dichotomy" come to my mind. By your logic landlords are just handing contracts out at random if they can't stalk you online.
> I wonder how landlords have dealt with this problem all that time before we had social media.
They would ask for your previous landlords, and possibly call them for references. Maybe there was just more damage done back in those days, which is now preventable. I don't think they pay people to stalk social media for fun, there's probably a legitimate business practice behind it. Whether that improvement in their business performance is worth the loss of privacy is an open question and worth debate.
> By your logic landlords are just handing contracts out at random if they can't stalk you online.
What? They didn't say that. Don't put words into the parent's mouth. Strawmen are really poor argument opponents.
UK has the same thing and I assume so does the rest of Europe. http://homelet.co.uk/tenants
Includes cover for accidental damage to your landlord’s property or furniture
I'd you mean failure to pay then that's a seperate issue, but does not risk 100+k property.
- will these people keep 15 cats, despite the contract saying they can't, who will piss all over the place requiring new carpeting after they move out, or a rottweiler who will chew up all my door stiles (and good luck suing for and collecting damages from someone who doesn't have a regular income or even regular place of residence);
- will this person come home drunk, loudly, at 2am three times a week, causing the neighbors (who pay in time and never give trouble) to move out, leaving me with the vacant property for some time and the work to find another tenant;
- will this person pay in time, or will I have to call 3 times every month and even then only get paid in chunks most of the time;
- will this person stay for a while or want to move out after 4 months, despite having signed a one year lease, leaving me with the trouble and time investment.
Renting out property is not a high-margin business. 'Inefficiencies' like a unit being vacant for 2 months out of the year are the difference between 'better return than savings account' and 'I should have stuffed the money in a sock under my mattress'; and that's not even counting the work you have to put into it (advertising, showing people around, chasing payment, fixing things, court sessions, ...) (OK the last few years savings accounts yield 0, I'm talking about longer terms)
What I'm trying to say is - most renters think of their landlords as fat cats to whom they have to hand over 1/3rd of their monthly income for doing nothing. The reality is much more nuanced - yes it's a business, like any other, but a highly competitive one at that (in most markets); if I was 'rich' as most of them seem to assume, I sure as hell wouldn't be dealing with the hassle of being a landlord.
PS: IMO, it's important to separate the value of a property from the income stream it generates. Someone that's 3 weeks late every month in paying their rent you 250$/year in interest and some aggravation, but that's almost meaningless in the end just toss in a late fee and it tends to average out in the end.
Edit: 26 years -> the entire time social media has existed, to please the pedantry.
I don't think that part matters too much considering social media in its current form wasn't really around for most of that time :)
Standard New York landlords who are leasing empty apartments as a business just run a credit check— they'd probably exposing themselves to problems under fair housing laws if they asked for much more.
In fact, regarding twitter, my policy is to never use it except to link to other things or retweet someone else's post. Because a 140 character statement on a complex topic is a recipe for disaster.
Its like the old problem of how does an aristocracy keep itself in power? Well the expensive, crude, and unreliable method is lots of soldiers and aggressive top down force, but a more advanced, cheaper, reliable method is to propose two identical figurehead leaders with wildly varying PR campaigns and convince the public that selecting between the identical figureheads is the definition of freedom.
Or might they believe me, and think I'm too odd-stream to rent their apartment or work in their office?
I'm in a similar situation. The only social media I have is a private Twitter account that I used for about 2 days and posted basically nothing to. People in general seem to understand my choice, though that might just be my social circle. I haven't yet been in a position where I've been asked to provide social media accounts for someone to check my credibility.
Also, other factors are probably relevant. "No twitter" is very different from "No twitter, because I'm married with twins."
We like to conflate large percentages as "practically 100%" but even ".1%" just means "1 in 1000". For large groups even low percentages can represent a significant quantity.
I was never asked for any of this (well, except github on job applications in the past which never been a problem when I explain them I don't have one) and if in the future I am, I probably will drop the deal (whatever it is) on the spot.
I use email/phone if I want to do something with someone (mostly phone). There may be events like a house warming party that only gets posted to FB, but somehow that tends to reach me through someone, and if they don't, well.. not much is lost to be honest.
To be fair, most of the people I hang out with aren't that into Facebook/other or even if they are, they know I'm not there so they reach out to me/my wife over the phone.
I'm in my early 30's if it it counts for anything.
It's a solved problem, since before the web, and even before the internet.
They are legitimately my accounts, I just don't use their services. I have a paper list somewhere with over 220 accounts, many defunct of course. Most accounts across the entire internet are, of course, unused or empty, its not going to be unusual.
It should be titled something like this: What I learned about myself when my landlord asked me for my Twitter account
Who are you trying to filter out? Credit checks are likely already required so you already know their financial situation. If they're lying about anything critical, the contract likely already has that covered.
If anything, it's a tone-deaf sociopathic attempt to "get to know each other".
Then there's people who post pictures of property damage "So drunk I puked all over the carpet last night", perhaps with an attached pix of vodka and blue kool aide, is not going to sell well to a guy who just paid for new carpet in his rental.
And then there's pets, cat owners can't avoid posting cat pix, although "in the olden days" a quiet although banned pet might have been tolerated under a "no problem for me, no problem for you" doctrine but if half your posts are cat pix its kind of hard to consider that "keeping quiet". At the complex I lived in during my bachelor years there was some variation between what corporate thought one onsite manager would do and enforce, and what one onsite manager physically could do and enforce, and given 200 hours of theoretical work per week the manager was very libertarian WRT no complaints = not a high priority for him. But he can't CYA with corporate if some tenant insists on posting daily (banned) cat pictures. Not to mention if it came to eviction time having to explain to a judge why documented misbehavior was tolerated for months or only enforced against some pet owners (here's three twitter accounts of kittens, why is my hyperactive Shetland Sheepdog the only pet the rule is enforced against, surely its because I'm a minority)
Due diligence aside, documented evidence only comes into play if you become aware of it. If your tenant is posting pics of a pet they're not allowed to keep in the apartment but you're not aware of the pics, no problem. If you pre-emptively ask for their social media details and then neglect to act on the information you find, sure, all blame on you.
There's an important difference between being made aware of information and actively seeking it out. Morally there's no difference between a landlord denying you an apartment because they've been shown a tweet of you bragging about doing property damage or because they were actually there and saw you do it. But there's a world of difference between either of those and intentionally rummaging through a candidate's social media presence to actively look for grounds of denial.
For the pet issue, yeah if you don't uniformly enforce the rules you have, you're going to have a bad time. That should be common sense. If pets aren't allowed, then don't allow pets. That's pretty simple. There are plenty of places that might allow small pets but not a large sheepdog and that's perfectly fine as long as its clearly spelled out in the lease.
I've never had any known repercussions from my posts but I know of 3 instances where people I knew have. Perhaps I dont know of an instance where I was looked over because of Social Media.
One was a person failed a class for saying "the final was so easy it was like I cheated."
Another person was denied a house to rent because they told the Landlord they didnt have dogs. Landlord checked their facebook and saw pics of his two large pitbulls.
The last person had a pic of them uploaded on Instagram while they were eating at work in uniform with their middle finger up (we worked at a restaurant). There was an investigation and person was suspended until it was finished. Luckily he didnt loose his job and was allowed to come back.
Be care what you post for!