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?

Comments

What do you expect?

[cdrguru]

If your job has you isolated in a cube farm with utterly no contact with the outside world during work hours, I'd say you can do whatever you want in your off hours. Today, jobs like that are getting rare and likely to be non-existent in the near future.

Let's say you have a technical job that involves nothing more than talking to an occasional tecnical partner of your employer. When the person you're talking to finds something outrageous about you, do you think it isn't going to get around? Worse, let's say they are a rabid fundamentalist and find out about your Wiccan postings on the web. Sure, it isn't any of their business but that hardly stops anyone anymore. If you can't communicate with the people you're supposed to communicate with as part of your job, it is going to come back to you. Yes, it is a round-about path up through your company's partner and back down, but it still happens.

If you have a customer service job, magnify this by about 100x. If your employer is ever connected with your online identity and you do something outrageous or offensive to some, it will come back around to you in the end.

Can your employer afford this sort of nonsense? Not usually. So much so that if your off-hours activities affect you, your job or your employer in any way you are going to need to find a new job that didn't get burned.

Finally, if you think your off-hours activities have no effect on your job, what would you say about a cop that belongs to the KKK or other white power group and patrols a black inner city area during the day? No connection? My guess is that police department is going to get sued by some big-name black folks if something like this ever came out. Even if he never does anything, the connection will taint everything. Your job may not be as sensitive or as public, but you can't isolate your life completely between work and non-work. Can't be done.

Re:You can still make an effort

[FLEB]

Oh, you're clever. Come Monday morning, three or four people named Ed Zantolak are going to be meeting Security at the door.