A friend of mine is a doctor. One day she refused to perform a dangerous procedure for a patient. The procedure had already failed once, and she knew for a fact if it didn't work the first time it wouldn't work this time either. The patient insisted that she do the procedure anyway. He turned out to be a big donor, and a hospital administrator told my friend that she could either do it or lose her job. She wasn't doing that well financially at the time, and had three kids to feed at home. Put yourself in her shoes. You're staring in the administrator's face. There's a 3% chance this procedure will kill the patient, and a 0% chance it will help him. What do you do?

I hope you'd walk away, and I hope I would too. But my point is, it's easy to say what your ethics are, and a lot harder to act ethically in the moment. Doing that little thing you were sure you would never do is so easy when your boss is staring at you, or your coworker needs you to cover their ass, or you stand to make an extra $20k a year if you get this job, or whatever.

My friend said she realized that day that in order to be a good doctor, you have to always know, at any given moment, that you might just have to walk away. You have to be ready.

I'm not a doctor, but it's a rule I've taken to heart.

That's a lesson they're supposed to teach you in medical school: primum non nocere, "first, do no harm." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere)

Sure. Although if we want to get nerdy about it -- and I trust we do -- that saying was a lot more useful before scientific medicine. When doctors mostly had tools like bloodletting available to them, and didn't know to wash their tools before doing surgery, it was almost always better to do nothing. (Interestingly, religious prohibitions on seeing doctors made quite a bit of sense back then ...)

In modern medicine, it's almost never a choice between doing harm and not doing harm. It's more like, "well, assuming we've properly guessed what's wrong with you, the studies say you have a 20% chance that this surgery will work and won't kill you, and a 10% chance of living more than three months without the surgery. Your family will have to go into debt to make the surgery happen, so your call." The best you can do is explain as much as you can to the patient and let them decide -- so it becomes their impossible ethical decision instead of yours. That's better, right?

  - do no harm to your kids
  - do no harm to some stranger

Pick one.

Expound on that. Why stops us from not doing harm to both?

"She wasn't doing that well financially at the time, and had three kids to feed at home."

... I'm an idiot that got lost in the tree of comments

you can still delete that comment, in the next hour.

So what did she do?

She did the procedure. She got lucky and the patient wasn't hurt. Then she found a job in a hospital run by doctors instead of administrators.

I feel bad even telling this story, because my friend is a super ethical person and this is far from her proudest moment. But that's how these things go, right? You come to a moment where every practical consideration tells you to do the thing you don't believe in, and no one ever has to know, and it probably won't cause any harm this one time ... and you become someone you never wanted to be. It takes real strength and forethought to make the right call there in the moment.

Thank you for sharing this. People commonly boast about what they would do in trying circumstances. I'll point them to this situation.

For college athletes sometimes that option isn't there. If you've only got one school interested in you, and they're requiring you to provide it - calling their bluff is a risky move (on the other hand, might be worth pursuing a career in something other than sports if you're only talking to one school).

So just create a 2nd "fake" account with seemingly "real" data and show them that. Or tell them you don't actually have a facebook account. It is possible to set the security so that people are unable to find/search for you.

Anyway, I presume this is a US thing, this would never happen in the EU, it would go to the european court of human rights (or some court or other) so fast you won't even have time to apply lube!

> So just create a 2nd "fake" account with seemingly "real" data and show them that.

I imagine that with the username/password, they'd notice that it was created two weeks ago, and that your friend network is all bots.

The article says they are longer requesting username/password and instead looking over the shoulder.

Why not add in some of your real friends? I said nothing about bots. Tell them why you need this. Change the name of your real account to something else. Hide it. Disable it.

I think also that the new facebook timeline allows you to place "stories" and "events" to any point of time in the past.

Or start deleting what you want hidden from your facebook account and then hand over the details.

Or, how about some foresight. I don't know, how about I create a second account and keep that running side by side right now, because I'm in one of those industries that are douches about this kind of thing. I know some people that do this to keep stuff hidden from family members.

Man, I have to think of everything round here... :)

Everything I've just said I think is extremely wrong and if an employer asked me for these then I'd tell them to go fk themselves.

Yes, you can try to hack the system- but if they think you're lying or being misleading your chances of playing for them may be gone. This shouldn't be legal in the first place- but doing the second or fake account workaround (or saying you don't have an account when you really do) is risky if they ever find out.