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How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet
The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the 'free time' activities of their employees via their web presence. "When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have career-altering consequences." The piece likens this activity to the 'Sociological Department' that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?
You should simply use an alias and never reveal that alias to an employer. I realize that it's a good opportunity to increase your chances of employment by allowing an employer to take a look at your online work but, its simply absolutely none of their business. If you are really desperate for the extra bang on your resume I suggest immediately afterwards you change to a different alias and notify all of your friends that you need to change in order to protect your anonymity from your employer (Via private means of course).
I think the main problem is that we can't really separate personal opinions from business ones.
Freedom of speech is a nice thing, but in real word people don't say to employers what they think if it means they lose their jobs. Goverment mostly protects citizens being harassed by goverment itself, but it does very little if private citizen limits other persons freedom of speech or goverments agencies as employer do it.
Or lets phrase that again. Yes, anyone can say anything and freedom of speech is almost without limits. But no law guarantees using that right won't have consequences like losing your job or business. On private or public sector.
And thats the fundamental problem of political rights. If they don't protect people who exercise them economically too, they are just laws that state 'you can do this or that - if you can afford it'.
In real world it means that if you can't afford it, you have to give away your rights. Even those protected in name by constitutions. So actually, freedom of speech for example, knows bounds.
Fundamentals question is then, shouldn't political rights be also economical rights?
Shouldn't they be if they can't be separated in real world?
What are those rights that can't be taken away, but you can't afford to exercise? They are no rights at all far as I can tell.
To keep your real name offline to the best of your ability. I see no reason for people online to know my real name, or tie it to my internet activities.
I see reasons both for and against. On the one hand, yes, you have these privacy concerns that are totally valid. On the other, here you have the internet, which is *designed* to connect people. In the early days, *everybody* used their real name - heck, I still belong to one forum that was probably among the first on the web where I still use my real name (few other people there do).
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you. I've been contacted by long lost friends and family that I never thought I'd speak to again, and I've got a big network of people that I talk to online now (and in real life) that I'd never have found offline. This is one of the big attractions of the net; in fact, I consider the internet pretty pointless otherwise. Is the internet nothing more than a bunch of companies hawking products, low-quality amateur scat porn and anonymous strangers yammering at each other? That's even worse than real life. Why would anyone want that?
But I also don't see this as just an evil plot by the corporations. A person's outside behavior has *always* been fair game in terms of employment... the only difference is the internet makes it easier to track. Let's say a company hires an accountant, who at some point during his term of employment gets into a bar fight and gets arrested. He comes in to work the next day bruised and bloody, and the story makes the local newspaper. What do you think is going to happen? Most likely, he's going to get fired. It doesn't matter that he did it on his own time; companies want well-adjusted, positive people working for them, and in an "at will" system of employment, "job security" has always been an illusion. You have job security provided you play the game right, and that means at work and at home. It's always been that way.
People act like asses on the internet because they think they can get away with it. But they can no more get away with it on the net than that accountant could get away with being in a real-life bar fight that makes the local papers. An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
Of course, you can argue about moral standards, but if your company doesn't share your own moral standards, then maybe you shouldn't be working there to begin with.
As for me, I don't make any particular effort to hide my full real name but I don't freely give it out either. In a Google search of my name, I don't come up at all. Even still, I try not to do anything that's going to make me look stupid online, regardless of who's going to see it. I think that's probably good advice for anybody.
We got a dose of this in Australia thanks to imported management that possibly got kicked out of the USA for not getting over slavery. A division of a company held a Christmas party for it's employees and due to spectactular mismanagement it was held in March. After the party had finished three employees went to a hotel room and got very amorous. In the next mind boggling stupid and over the top piece of mismanagement the woman was fired for this and two men cautioned - the manager had decided both that he ruled the off duty hours of the employees and that Taliban morality should be enforced by blaming the woman. Instead of upper management resolving it the whole thing ended up in the high court in an attempt to justify the idiot and it cost the company a packet and even made the government look bad for letting such a thing happen (the unfair dismissal laws that had prevented this in the past were in a state of change). The company is Telstra which is still effectively the Australian telecomunications monopoly.
I keep my private and business lives well-encapsulated, even to the extent of never introducing my coworkers to my friends. My employer asserts the customary feudal prerogative of controlling every moment of my waking life while still only paying me for part of it. This is not because they have some God-given right to direct my life, it is because they can get away with it in the present rigged system, and they have more power than I do. But having an unfeeling, brain-dead bureaucracy stick their nose into my private life is no better when it's an HR department than when it's a government agency. It's repression all the same. It's an odious feature of the present system.
I don't regard them as malicious so much as arrogant, overzealous and misguided. So I practise operational security and communication security in order to minimize their opportunities to mess with me. But that's out of necessity, not out of any belief that I owe it to them to do that. And I'm not talking about any "right" to a job. I'm just saying that they don't own me, yet in many respects they behave as though they do. And due to the extreme, government-backed asymmetry of power relations in the workplace (you think employers have it tough? Look at the restrictions on union activity sometime), those are the conditions we have to live under in the US. And I'm a well-compensated employee. It's far worse for those with lower-paid, more commoditized jobs. That's where employers really run amok.
And please, never talk about "extreme risk" when all you're referring to is money. I've lived in parts of the world where risk means you or your family getting killed, dismembered, driven from your home. That's risk. What you're talking about is just putting your money where your mouth is.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I write this a am member of the military so I have a bit of understanding about the extremes of this argument.
First, the type of employment matters a lot. Technically, military personnel are under a "Personal Services Contract." We are paid no matter what we do, where we do it or even IF we do it. I do not clock in or out, I receive no overtime, comp time, sick time. I have annual leave but technically it is simply permission to be away from my duty location for a period of time. Given the nature of the contract, it is perfectly reasonable for my "employer" to have an interest in my personal life.
Compare that with about 99% of the jobs out there any the question becomes more clear. If I get paid overtime or receive comp time then the portion of my day that you do not pay for is my business. If you want to be involved in that part of the day, pay up.
Now the argument is normally image. If I am doing table dances at Hooters at 1 AM how can I represent the company at 9 AM. I have no problem with that either but it needs to be clearly spelled out in the Performance Work Standards. If I work in the mail room and my interaction consists of the letters and the box they go in, you would have a hard time getting away with saying the company image had been damaged. Of course none of this applies to "at will" employees. Where companies screw up is when they TELL an at will why they were fired. Idiots, just fire them.
Back to my situation. My employer has complete control of my life. 99% of the time, my employer does not exercise that control. Anyone who has been even close to a military base knows that soldiers drink and do dumb things. The mere fact that the military CAN punish people for off duty behavior prevents a lot but not all dumb stuff. Still, we are not a machine and decisions are made by PEOPLE. Most military leaders understand the where the line is and when it has been crossed. They know because the military is unique in this county as the only large organization that ONLY promotes from within. Everyone starts at the bottom meaning no one gets to a decision maker position without spending far more time subject to someone else making decisions. Right now we are struggling with blogs and MySpace because of generational differences in leadership. Nothing new. It was Rock and Roll vs Big Band in the 60s. Almost everyone I know has had a boss at one extreme or the other - either holding prayer meetings or starting with drinks at 1500 (3PM) on a Tuesday. Neither one is good. Most of us shoot for the middle but most actually end up far more "liberal" then most people outside the military would think. We tolerate far more off duty behavior than most people believe simply because the alternative is so crushing on moral. IMHO civilian companies could learn a lot from seeing how the military restrains itself despite the tools for total control.