Be careful what you say and post on the Internet

When moving around the Internet always be careful with what you say and post online.  You never know when it will come back to bite you.

These days people are way to used to posting information on the Internet thanks to sites like MySpace and Facebook.  The downside to this is that everyone knows way more information about everyone, including people that they don’t know personally.  It is amazingly easy to find out when people are out of town, or out at dinner, and where they are.

This is especially true of the younger kids on the Internet.  They may think nothing of posting way to much information on the Internet, information that you as a parent you don’t want them posting.

As these kids get older they may begin posting things on the Internet which could get them in some trouble at work, or even cost them their jobs.  There are several stories of people getting fired from their jobs by posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Here’s a guy that was fired from a brand new job for posting something stupid on Twitter, or this girl who was fired for posting that her job was boring on Facebook.  There are countless others out there just like these.

The even bigger number who probably be the collage grads who don’t change there security status of their Facebook profiles before starting the job hunt.  All those fun college parties probably shouldn’t be public while looking for that first office job.  While the hiring manager assumes that you had a good time in school, the pictures of you doing a topless keg stand will not help you get the job.

Those of us that write and live our lives publicly are probably not the best examples to follow sometimes, but we have been doing this a while, and when we interview we are given a little more leeway on some of this stuff than someone who is new to the field (what ever field that may be).

While it may not seem fair that your future employer is going to search the net looking for you, they are.  Live isn’t fair, and the company which may hire you needs to make sure that they are getting the best worker for their money, and how you spend your after hours time is taken into account.

While changing your security settings on Facebook is a good plan, it isn’t going to fix the problem.  Google, Bing, etc will have all those photo’s and posts cached so while Facebook won’t let someone see the page, the cached versions will still be available via the search engines, not to mention the Internet Archive.

Denny