Comments | fling93: be careful with your online persona

fling93

be careful with your online persona

Jun 11, 2006 01:19

This should be obvious, but in case you haven't seen it yet, the New York Times reports:Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up ( Read more... )

blogging, privacy

Comments 14

retch June 11 2006, 09:07:56 UTC

eh, I posted on Usenet back in the day, already fu>

fling93 June 11 2006, 18:26:18 UTC

Hmm, guess your l33t fooled LJ into thinking there was a tag.

eh, I posted on Usenet back in the day, already fuXored. So it goes. My plan, not worry about it, anywhere uptight enough that my history is an issue isn't anywhere I want to work anyhow. Heh. I do struggle a bit with the public/private thing, some of my posts (mostly work angst related ones) have been private which grates my craw a little bit.

Dating also gets run through the web search thing. Our lives are fairly open books at this point without a lot of effort, and the cost of that effort is a bunch of really cool connectivity. I find the net benefit in
being open and sharing. :)

I think employers don't go much beyond what's easy to find, so they probably won't see the Usenet stuff. Anyway, if you're not having problems finding work, you probably don't need to worry. I imagine your industry isn't as uptight about their employees' private lives as some others.

tshuma June 11 2006, 14:40:54 UTC

*nod* For the same reasons, I keep my given name separated from my blog and netspace profiles. Usually, anyway. Especially as I've been interviewing more in technical roles lately, and I continue to encounter interviewers who've already looked me up via Google before they've ever seen my face.

fling93 June 11 2006, 18:30:46 UTC

Haven't run into anyone who's looked me up yet (that I know of), but I've tended to err on the paranoid side until relatively recently. And you can search my real name on MySpace and find me cuz I hadn't thought of that, and I think there's a lot of MySpacers who also fall into the same boat.

But at least I'm not going to be on the job market for some time, and there's only a couple of things I'd need to change on my profile to "clean it up."

rhiannonstone June 11 2006, 19:43:30 UTC

It's sad to me that people have to be told about this common-sense stuff. Of course, none of the kids I went to school with ever understood that you don't write anything down on paper that you wouldn't want read, so why should kids now understand that about the Internet?

fling93 June 11 2006, 19:54:03 UTC

Yeah. Of course, while it's common-sense, I think it's also a bit counter-intuitive. When you communicate with somebody, you generally don't think about that communication getting to people other than the intended audience. I recall a similar article a while back about a similar phenomenon about high-school kids and e-mails or text messages being used to blackmail each other. Back in the days when speech was the only way to communicate, humans didn't have these issues.

But yeah, it doesn't take a lot of thought to figure these things out.

earthdog June 11 2006, 23:51:23 UTC

There are a large number of things I will blog about for that reason.

Here is a question for you: If you applied for a job and they asked for all your on-line alias what would you do?

fling93 June 12 2006, 00:01:45 UTC

Not everybody has an online alias, so I doubt that question would come up. Still, I would like to think that I would tell them it's none of their business.

earthdog June 12 2006, 00:07:50 UTC

If people are looking up myspace accounts, they might ask for the info about your accounts. I do not think this is a protected question, like age. That means they refuse to hire for this reason.

fling93 June 12 2006, 04:27:02 UTC

Ask what info? Your password? I think that'd be a violation of privacy.

Thread 6

sennalesi June 21 2006, 13:49:36 UTC

I am probably the most paranoid person you would ever want to meet about protecting my online identity. I have my journal completely friends-locked and never sign up for anything (free e-mail, forums, etc) with my real, full name. I don't like to post pictures of myself for that reason, even though I really want to. Wow, I sound nuts, don't I?

fling93 June 21 2006, 17:09:15 UTC

Naw, I was like that for a while (then again, I started becoming active online shortly after 9/11). Not saying that this is something you outgrow, cuz I have no idea why that changed for me. But in light of the above, fear and caution might actually be the sane response.

I guess you can't friends-lock pictures on LJ, huh? Well then, you should totally join Flickr.