So much cooler online...

Times article about how the younger generation is starting to re-think the "live-out-loud" part of social networks and online presence

I have two distinct directions I want to take this:

Focus: What is your view of the "online presence" thing? Talk about your opinions of online privacy, if having an online presence is a good or bad thing, whether you view it as having legitimate real-world connections (e.g. can your boss make you "friend" him? Can he/she fire you for an inappropriate picture?). Delete your facebook, myspace, twitter for any of these reasons?

Alt. Focus: Stories. Ever done/seen where something online had real-world ramifications? Joined any online dating websites? How'd that go?

 

I imagine that if someone did some detective work using my posts here, they could work out a rough guess of where I am, where I work, and maybe who I am. But ultimately I like to keep my privacy.

I have had Facebook since October 12. 2004, when you could only have one photo, and you had to be in a university. It was a great tool for finding out what hot girls are in your class.

Ultimately, it is now just a tool for me to keep in touch. I have no personal information on there outside of my name, and my hobbies, and favorite crap because there is no reason for that to be on there. The email I have it registered to is a throwaway email (honestly, if people don't have an email that they use for all of their online transactions, and a separate email for private correspondence, they are a moron. Especially if they complain about spam.) I have pictures of my travels on there, and none of me in anyway that could be compromising, especially now that it is so hard to hide your pictures from people who aren't your friends.

On the topic of should your employer force you to be "friends" with them on Facebook? Hell no. Facebook is something you enter into privately, and is an aspect of your private life. Even if you get a request from your boss, just block them. A guy at my work got written up when on a day he had called in sick, he had uploaded pictures from an outdoor event from the previous weekend. He happened to be friends with our supervisor, and the supervisor saw a couple of these pictures, and had started disciplinary action against the employee.

I think that your private life is just that, separate from your work life. If your private life has significant ramifications to your working life, such as drug abuse, or severe problems with alcohol, than that is legitimate cause. But saying you don't like work, or posting a picture of yourself at a bar on a weekend? That should be completely off limits.

Also, I really can't stand Facebook for the ads and suggestions. The only people it says I should add as friends are my supervisor, and the only people it recommends that I reconnect with are dead.
Not to mention the fact that the second I listed myself as engaged, every ad on the sidebar was for wedding shit.

 

One of my girlfriend's friends is an HR director for one of the big five Canadian banks. Very reserved, very professional, and very fucking hot with fantastic Double D's. She'd never been one for showing them off and like I said she's very reserved so they stay hidden most of the time. A week before the wedding, for her bachelorette party her girlfriends made her wear a low cut tight top as part of her ensemble. Drinking ensues, pictures are taken. Pictures are posted on facebook. This was before you could limit who sees what photo album and every person had a label telling the user how you knew them (you and so and so worked together/went to school together/etc).

One of the bridesmaids (read: jealous bitch) went through the bride-to-be's profile and tagged every single one of this woman's co-workers and subordinates on photos showing the bride in a compromising position. After sending mass apology e-mails to her colleagues, the bride dis-invited the bridesmaid from her wedding effectively ending a 15 year friendship.

Pretty tame, but it's all I got.

 

I'm pretty ambivalent to my online presence. I know that in the age of the Internet, 98% of my personally identifiable information is out there already anyway. Trying to get your information off the internet is like trying to take piss out of a swimming pool. However, I do know that prospective people in your life (HR managers of the job you want, hot girl you've been sweating, etc.) will google your ass as soon as they have a scrap of information to check. I'm slightly bothered that I might be discounted as a job applicant/whatever because my Facebook happened to have pictures of me getting hammered, but I'm dumb for putting that up in the first place.

As far as Facebook/Myspace stuff is concerned, I refuse to friend anybody that I don't know personally and happens to be work-related. I hate fucking drama as much as the next red-blooded guy and co-mingling my work and home lives would be a shitstorm. I had to learn this the hard way after a relationship with a coworker went sour. Yes, it's about as bad as you can imagine. I had to delete my myspace profile over it. I was only able to refriend my old coworkers when I put an ocean in between them and me.

 

What really irritates me is the idea that Facebook or other such social networking sites are the work of the devil because 1) your identity might get stolen or 2) marketing companies might use your personal info to send personalised ads to you.

1) This to me is just plain retarded. If you don't want your identity stolen, or if you're worried about people looking at your FB photos or profile surreptitiously, then you can easily quit it. Nobody forced you to join social networking sites, it's not mandatory and you can lead a life without sharing every detail of it online (shock horror)

2) I might be unique here, but if from whatever info a company might glean from my social networking accounts (which by all accounts is a lot) they send me advertisments for products I may be interested in, I'm not gonna get too pissy. Who doesn't like looking at ads for things they like? If they see I like golf, and Edwin Watts send me their latest catalogue or whatever, I'm gonna be OK with that, cos I can waste 5 minutes looking at the shiny new golf clubs without getting my vagina all sandy.

These sorts of argument always remind me of the saying 'empty vessels make the most noise'

 

I had a chick go psycho on me cause she thought we were supposed to be mutually exclusive. She seriously went beast mode, and MySpace was her sword. She had complete access to everyone I knew and used it. Between harassing my friends to my whereabouts when I ignored all contact with her, and sending sexually explicit emails to my ex and other female friends, this chick fucked up a Mardi Gras weekend.

I'm really glad I went through my teens and early twenties before the whole social networking craze kicked off. As far as social networking goes, I use LinkedIn. No pictures, it's professional and I actually want to put my bosses/people I work for on there. That shits for the birds. If I want the people I know and work with to see my ass, we go drinking.

 

I keep things compartmentalized.

I refuse all friend requests from co-workers and have all my privacy settings set to friends only on FB. My co-workers can guess about how awesome my life is, I don't need to rub their face in it.

I have a blog where I write about my own version of "white collar crime" ie doing nothing and being paid too much for it but you won't find a link to it anywhere near anything associated with me.

If I do decide to go sailing when I've told my employer I'm going to be in PA on a sales trip I don't tell anyone other than the people I'm taking with me about it.

I run my own business that actually takes up more hours in the day than my job but no one I work with knows about it.

All my online social interactions other than facebook are conducted through an email that is another pseudonym.

I own every computer I use for web browsing, email, etc rather than let my employer supply me with one.


Is it foolproof? No, but it'll suffice.

 

Pretty sure Facebook lets you set stuff to only allow certain groups to see certain things. So, you can accept family members and coworkers, but put them in a group that somewhat limits what they see of you.

I think it'd be seen as sorta odd if someone my age didn't have a Facebook profile, and it seems that rather than trying to hide photographs of you doing something illegal or incredibly stupid it might be better to not take photographs of yourself doing something illegal or incredibly stupid. At the very least be sure to remove tags from photos of you doing something illegal or incredibly stupid.

 

Just this past week I posted in the rant and rave thread about deleting my facebook account. It may have been an overreaction, but I got tired of all the changes to their privacy policy that they try to sneak past us. Even before that, however, I had set my profile privacy settings to be pretty damn tight. Basically, if you weren't already on my friends list you couldn't search for me, and if you did find a link to my profile all you would see was my name and my current profile picture. I had no fan pages on my profile, my interests were completely blank, I didn't even have my birthday or my home town listed. I also had around half of my friends blocked from showing activity on my feed, too many people posting stupid shit that I don't care about.

 

I'm a high school teacher and I have an uncommon first name making it very easy for kids to find me on Facebook. I do however keep my profile set to private, my profile picture nondescript and don't add any kids (I have added one or 2 ex students who I was close to when I taught them.) I have had kids add me numerous times, but I just reject the request and speak to the student in person, explaining that I'm their teacher, not their friend and I don't want to know about their personal life and they don't need to know about mine.

About 6 months ago, a state government here in Australia revised their code of contact banning teachers from contacting students via social networking sites

Basic common sense there, however the code also stated that teachers must not have inappropriate content (including obscene language and sexual innuendo.) It's not in this article, but in an interview I saw on TV it stated that teachers accounts may be randomly checked. As far as I'm concerned, if your account is on private and you're only friends with people you know (because you're an idiot if it's not and you add randoms) who cares what the hell you say on your status update.

 

That's until one of your "friends" does something like this:

Of course you should trust your friends, but any human being isn't perfect and actually really messed up. Obviously, more than 9/10 people's friends would not pull something like this. But it only takes one person to make that douchebag move to screw you over. I don't know if you heard, but there was a teacher who was fired for HOLDING a beer bottle while on a boat and her facebook profile is private.. The fact that there was an expectation of acting like a saint was what led me away from the field of education.

On the subject of privacy, am I the only one who thinks it's a good thing to have people "be themselves" and post drunk photos if that's what a part of them is about? What difference should it make to my boss if I still produce the same quality work, it's not like alcohol from 2 days ago impacts my ability to think. Professionalism: it'll get you far in your career, but not as much in actual friendship. On the other hand, there is the argument that any person that left an unprofessional photo out there for the world to see it may not exactly be the best candidate for employment.

 

I think this is super important for people to read again if they just blew over it. EVERY person I have known that's gotten a DUI has had their attorney tell them to get rid of that stuff. One buddy got into a really nasty one in particular, and completely removed all of his pages, sent out a rather frantic email to remove him from any pictures, and even after he was finished with his court case didn't set his pages up as they once had been before. Private investigators used to go out and get character pictures of people, their jobs have got have have become a lot easier since it seems like people really want to get themselves caught in compromising situations these days. I know adults that make their page look like they still party like they're college freshmen.

I've said this bit before and saying it again, be careful what you want people to see on there. I used to do hiring for my department and first thing I did was pop on social networking sites, before even checking references. Same with when I had to find roommates. I had one guy with a default picture holding a gun. Never called him back, but I'm sure that picture was 'so haaawt he got mad pu$$y LOL!!1!'

 

Everyone's telling me this, but I'm just a college student who likes to get drunk a lot. I have no privacy settings on my profile and why should I give a fuck? Okay, if there's pictures of me doing lines of coke I could see where that would cause trouble but otherwise?

Some guy isn't going to hire me when I graduate becuase I like to get drunk at the weekends?? Really?

 

I haven't really given Facebook serious attention, even when it first came out. I have a profile, but I usually visit it ince, maybe twice a week. It is handy for keeping in touch, but I haven't posted a new picture on it in probably 18 months, and in that time my profile picture has been Harold Snepsts. Some people I know have 1,000- 4,000 friends on Facebook. That's fucking insane for that many people to be tapped into your life. I have about 200 on Facebook, but only people I personally know (and don't hate).
Most people I reject for "friend" requests, especially creepy people I used to go to school with and didn't even like in the first place. What's with that, anyway?

 

If you make yourself look like a drunk asshole online, you probably are in real life too. Really.

I don't know what YOUR page looks like, so I can't talk about you. However, if you think the content of these pages aren't a contributing factor, you really need to think twice about it and being outraged about the hypocrisy of it will change nothing. It sucks but life is not fair. Why do you want to show your ass to everyone? Every one in my profession drinks (graphic design)... a lot... but be smart about what you put out there. Again, you may not like it, but I'm telling you, other people on this board are telling you, AND EVERY HIRING TIPS PAGE I'VE READ tell you this. Keep these things in mind when you're starting out, why put yourself behind an avoidable 8 ball? You're selling yourself as much as you're selling your skills. One day you'll be the boss, and you can not give a shit about this stuff then. I agree with you in principal, just another reason to work for yourself.

There is a huge difference between someone that drinks on weekends and appears in a few pictures with a drink in their hand, and someone that has pictures smoking blunts and doing keg stands in every picture. If everyone's telling you this as you're heading out into the professional world, you'd be naive to think there isn't any truth to it. You seem like a smart guy, so just keep this stuff in mind when you're putting things out there for the world to see. Put your best foot forward brother.

 

To be fair, he is in Ireland and they probably don't care as much there (I could be full of it as I've never applied for a job there).

That said you are totally right, it's just plain stupid to allow potential employers to see pictures of you doing keg stands and just generally looking drunk. Whenever I'm applying for jobs I make myself invisible to people not on my friends list.

The best way I could ask it is what could you possibly gain from allowing your employer see compromising pictures of you? At best they might think you're a down to Earth guy, assuming they drink too, but even then they're hiring someone to do work, not trade drinking exploits with. On the flip side if they're the conservative type, like most of corporate America, they'll think you're a liability.

It's sad that we have to think this way since most people I know that party hard work even harder, but flat out if you hire 100 people who go balls out drinking every weekend and some week nights you'll have more bad eggs than if you hire 100 reclusive nerds. Take this with a grain of salt since I'm mainly referring to jobs where showing up on time and being able to perform at 100% all the time are more important than social skills.

 

I agree personality goes a little further than skill sometimes and a huge deciding factor, I am a prime example of this. I'm not the best designer, but people (for some reason) really like working with me rather than some of the arrogant pricks out there in my business. Let the interview show it though. Plain drunk and wild 21 years olds are a dime a dozen. All I was saying is be smart, without seeing his page I can't really speculate on his perspective of things, what he thinks are appropriate or inappropriate.

 

At the same time nothing comes to mind in these situations quite so readily as the quote, "a clean conscience is indicative of nothing but a poor memory." Just because it wasn't photo documented doesn't mean the "character and personality" of the previous generation isn't objectively worse in every single respect than the kids looking for jobs today (quick hint: The Baby Boomers are the worst generation of humans ever spawned). I think within the next ten years the complete ubiquitous nature of facebook will force HR managers to accept that these standards of employee personality sterility can't be maintained, lest they end up having no hires at all.