Let Your Boss Find Your Facebook Friends

Cloud computing, if you listen to Mark Benioff, is all grown up and ready for some action.

When I sat down recently with Mr. Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, his theme was that it was time for the new generation of software that lives on big servers (colloquially “in the cloud”) to start mingling.

“The concept is called connecting the clouds,” said Mr. Benioff. “We are a little out there, as usual.” Salesforce, he said, is developing links to other big cloud-computing platforms, including Amazon and Google.

But what better place for hook up in the cloud than Facebook?

Mr. Benioff showed me a new application meant to help companies recruit new employees. A company’s workers would give permission to the company to run software that combs the profiles of all of their Facebook friends to find those who might fit open jobs. Why would they do that? One reason is that many companies give bonuses to employees who help recruit people to open positions.

“We are able to take the information on Facebook, and empower you, the Facebook user, to do something you have not been able to do before,” he explained. “We are taking one database, your company’s job listings, and another database, all your Facebook friends and their profiles, and creating a third, the matches for these jobs.”

I found this a bit creepy, a bit like a divorced dad combing through his teenage daughter’s cellphone to find girls to date.

The application is written with an honor system to protect information of Facebook users who haven’t agreed to share certain information with potential employers.

Let’s say you are an employee of a company that uses this system and you install the Facebook application. The application, which runs on Salesforce’s computers, will be able to read all of the information in your friends’ profiles that they choose to show you — not just the information your friends have chosen to make public. Salesforce will match those profiles against the company’s job listings. You then can choose to send a message to any friend it says may fit a job opening, inviting that friend to apply for the job.

The way the system is supposed to work, Salesforce does not store any of the information from the profile or pass it on to the company. That way the only information your company knows about your friend is what he or she chooses to put on an application. But Clara Shih, a product manager at Salesforce, told me later that it was technically possible for a company connecting to Facebook’s system to keep profile data, even though that would violate Facebook’s rules.

I have no reason to think Salesforce or its clients would do anything inappropriate. And I know Facebook does try to keep an eye on users of its platform. But we also know that sometimes people don’t follow rules.

Mr. Benioff’s main reaction to my concern was that Salesforce was following the procedures defined by Facebook. He added another thought that seemed, if cavalier, very apt — and not just for Facebook — in a world where clouds are hooking up in ever more frenzied combinations.

“You have to be cautious what you put on your Facebook page because it will build someone’s database,” he said.