How to automatically scrub your Facebook page
(MoneyWatch) Though it's illegal in a handful of states for potential employers to ask for your Facebook password so they can check out your private posts, when it comes to companies browsing your public Facebook presence, all bets are off.
Thanks to inconsiderate friends tagging you in compromising situations and the powerful new Graph Search, you should be concerned about what your hiring manager might be able to find out about you on Facebook. Of course, you could always manually scan years' worth of photos and posts to look for content that might reflect poorly on you professionally, but that's a lot of work. Instead, you can now turn to FaceWash.
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FashWash is a free service that offers to clean up your profile for you. You'll need to give the service permission to access your profile. From there, the application takes a few minutes to scan your online history and then presents you with a list of all the entries that it deems questionable, based on a list of "dirty words" that it has in its database. You can then review each one and choose to clean up each post on a case-by-case basis.
You can also ask FaceWash to look for specific text. That makes it easy to find all the rants you might have made against a company that you're now about to interview for.
With a growing number of companies now doing social media background checks as part of the hiring process, FaceWash is a handy tool for ensuring you put your best face forward. And there's no danger that the app is going to erase important memories from your timeline -- it only makes recommendations, and the action you take is entirely up to you.
Dave Johnson
View all articles by Dave Johnson on CBS MoneyWatch »
Dave Johnson is editor of eHow Tech and author of three dozen books, including the best-selling How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera. Dave has previously worked at Microsoft and has written about technology for a long list of magazines that include PC World and Wired.
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