There’s a good thing in town, but mums the word.

Henry Ford’s hometown, Dearborn, Michigan, has a secret.

I know it, but I can’t tell you. Well, of course, I could, but then many people would be upset. Actually, it would make two groups angry. Both, the people who want to keep the secret to themselves, and the people who wish the secret didn’t exist.

In fact, I told a person who loves the secret that I was intending to blog about it and he urged me not to post. When I mentioned a blog to another Dearborn resident who doesn’t take advantage of the secret, he thought it was a bad idea.

“Then even more people will know the secret and people who live near the secret will be even more unhappy,” he cautioned.

Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. It’s what makes social networking such an enticing and provocative milieu. Facebook lured plenty of smart Wall Street money with the advertising possibilities of the virtual community and its shared photos, videos and messages, between friends, family and total strangers. LinkedIn has created a virtual club for professionals where people exchange business contacts, news, ideas, job leads and even free advice.

Yet, nothing is more alluring than a secret. Tell someone they can’t get something and it becomes a must have. That’s the foundation of limited editions and short supplies. Say no to customers and they just might demand you sell your product or service to them, even for more than your asking price.

Dearborn’s secret is a place with limited capacity. It’s visible from many locations; however, unless you see someone using it, you won’t know it’s there. A neighbor and his wife were excited to share the secret and even offered to give me a personal tour of it. They’ve experienced it in every season and find it even more appealing during Michigan’s chilliest weather, when many of us suffer from cabin fever.

I personally have enjoyed it on wheels and on foot, alone and with my wife, Ellen.

We’ve met four-legged Dearborn residents who know about the secret. Yet, most humans in our community are fully unaware.

In this era of constant electronic connectivity, people have managed to keep a special experience quiet that stretches across miles. Some of it is public territory and parts are private.

And I don’t want to be the one to spoil it, but I wonder if I’ll be able to keep the secret next week.

Beware of Job

In George Orwell’s novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” he crafted a diabolical character that oppressed free thinkers. Big Brother was a deified party leader of a dictatorship  that used ceaseless surveillance and mind control to manage society.

Ironically, in 2012, it’s not government that’s invading privacy to manage people, it’s free enterprise.

There’s commotion in Congress and protests on Main Street in opposition to employers who demand that job applicants release their credit reports and Facebook passwords. You can imagine, if you’ve been unemployed for a while, your credit report might look less than stellar. Complete Facebook access might reveal your love life, wacky pictures from your class reunion, your political affiliations and your religious beliefs and disabilities.

A lot of these topics are off limits to employers in job interviews. Here’s a sample of questions that are illegal for companies to ask applicants:

1. What is your maiden name?
2. Do you have or plan to have children?
3. What religion do you practice?
4. Do you belong to a social organization or club?
5. Do you have a disease?
6. Have you ever been arrested?

You get the idea. Employers aren’t allowed to discriminate on the basis of marital status, religious beliefs, social or political affiliation, disabilities and even crime. If an employer has a specific concern about fraud or theft, he or she must ask about those crimes only. An arrest doesn't make you a criminal. You've heard of innocent until proven guilty, right?

Among the rights we consider inalienable is the right to privacy. Seems our freedom of speech is getting some folks in trouble, and their freewheeling approach to social media is inadvertently lifting the veil on their private lives.  

What you post on Facebook can be used against you if you grant access to an employer. This year, a Congressional amendment designed to restrict prospective employers from asking for Facebook passwords failed in the House of Representatives. A coalition of 25 civil rights and labor groups are petitioning America’s largest credit reporting firms to stop selling employers access to financial records of job applicants. Some experts argue and have testified to state legislatures that there is no real world evidence to prove a correlation between credit reports and job performance or any employee crime such as stealing or embezzling.

And in a bad economy, like this one, even the most frugal can run into financial trouble. Yet surveys show 60 percent of employers use credit reports in at least some hiring decisions, and some companies won’t even consider unemployed people.

Now here’s a twist. It’s not uncommon for credit reports to be erroneous, and it can take months for you to get one corrected. Meanwhile, you may be rejected from a series of jobs without even knowing it’s your bogus credit history that’s the problem.

According to critics, Facebook is lax about complying with the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. Some reports estimate 5.6 million Facebook subscribers are under 13 years old. What a sophomoric kid posts as a teenager or college student could affect his future employment status. And unpaid credit card accounts could lead to similar repercussions.

In fairness and in the spirit of full disclosure, perhaps the Feds should require the following warnings be acknowledged before these transactions:

CAUTION: the contents of your Facebook page may be viewed by your future employer and may cost you a job.

WARNING: failure to pay credit card and other bills in a timely fashion could prevent you from getting a job.

CAUTION TO JOB APPLICANTS: during your job interview, the employer may ask you questions that are illegal. Should you work for this employer, you could be sexually harassed, illegally terminated, racially profiled, or discriminated against on the basis of age, sex, religion or political affiliation. This employer may subsequently file bankruptcy and fail to meet obligations to you such as salary, wages, benefits and pension. Federal law affords you the full right to take legal action against this employer in the event of illegalities or any breach of contract.

If nothing’s private then everything should be public, and clearly posted. Let all buyers beware.

Face it

What made Facebook a crazy success was that college kids had a place to hang out virtually, free of adult supervision. It played right into endless connectivity, a trend that began with Gen Y using e-mail, instant messaging and Napster. Shared experiences, 24/7. Eventually, their parents, little brothers and sisters and even grandma and grandpa joined the party.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg has gone and spoiled all the fun by taking his billion-member social network public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The reportedly greedy guru may have cashed out, because now he’s taken his cool idea corporate.

Ironically, when Zuckerberg and his partners first launched Facebook, while at Harvard University, he adamantly opposed the idea of selling advertising to monetize the burgeoning social media experiment. He didn’t want to prostitute the “coolness” of the concept until it became more viable. It was an online global village that belonged exclusively to college students.

But as the number of Facebook members grew to astronomical proportions, comparable to half the population of China, the urge to cannibalize it became too great. Now, you get to see ads next to photos of your friends and what they’re eating for lunch. Zuckerberg had built a village square for people and groups to gather for free. Now he sells electronic billboards around the perimeter and fills the air above with blimps and skywriters.

General Motors announced this week that it’s dropping Facebook ads, because the carmaker believes they’re ineffective. This went down as Facebook launched its IPO and later kicked off trading. But GM still says brands can build relationships through social media. It’s just that the ads don’t measure up. They’ve tasted the milk for free and don’t think it’s worth paying for.

I wonder if Zuckerberg’s future plans for generating profits will include a premium paid model. We’ll call it Facebook 3D. It could offer special features like chat rooms with celebrities and virtual backstage passes to concerts or events. Don’t laugh. LinkedIn and IMDb both have professional grade versions that you can access only if you buy a monthly subscription.

My sense is, people desire a commercial-free environment for the social lives. We always tolerated ads with free TV and radio. It was a small price to pay for all that programming. But the more we pay for cable and Internet access, the less it seems we should have to endure an endless stream of marketing.

Don’t get me wrong. Ads are very appropriate on the Web. For example, Google provides an amazing service free of charge. Type in a word or phrase and miraculously you receive hundreds and even thousands of related links, articles, images, videos and news stories. You name it. Anyone who is old enough to have done library research the old fashioned way and cranked through miles of microfilm should shed a tear every time Google spits out a list of links in seconds. The ads are a small price to pay for all that free knowledge. In fact, the ads are often exactly what we want to discover.

But there’s something particularly eerie about targeted ads showing up next to a photo of your little nephew’s birthday party. Or a snapshot at your brother’s wedding. We’ve reached the point where reality TV has become viewers broadcasting themselves and corporations selling that content without sharing the profits with the creators. Sounds kind of like what pimps do, doesn’t it?

Enter Dish Network and The Hopper. The satellite TV provider now offers a digital video recorder (DVR) that will automatically zap the commercials so you don't have to watch them during playback. Only seems appropriate since we all pony up so much for cable and satellite and still have to buy Web access. The networks are screaming about the editing technology.

Zuckerberg and his team will be under intense pressure to show a profit right away, since he’s got lots of investors now. Facebook may be tempted to snoop your posts and pics and offer ads that connect to your life. You post a photo of your new Chevy Camaro and Facebook ads for State Farm and Shell gasoline pop up. Maybe even a promo for a local detail shop and Auto Zone. How’s that sound?

The quickest way for Zuckergberg to raise profits is to sell a portion of his mammoth membership a subscription to Facebook on steroids. Let’s say, only 10% of current members buy in at 50 cents a month or five dollars a year for premium access. That would be 500 million bucks without selling a single ad. Ten bucks a year or about three cents a day is a billion dollars, and so on.

And the paid, premium version of Facebook could offer an ad-free environment, just like when the social network started.

Then Zuckerberg could charge corporations like GM big bucks to join as members and post their status. That’s what Facebook should sell, not your private life.