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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?
Yeah this internet thing might end up having some impact on the world....
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.
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).
So posting those drunken, pot smoking pics of myself on a publicly viewable online source (e.x facebook) might not be a good idea? That's news to me.
It's probably not a good idea to get totally trashed, strip naked, and broadcast yourself all over the internet?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/29/jim-chomas-career-joins-the-deadpool-maybe/
Better tell that dude.
um...
(looks over shoulder)
that uh...
i'll tell you later, gotta go
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fascism is older than the internet. Witch hunts are older than that. What you see is a bunch of companies that think they are so powerful that they can tell you to do and think as they say, 24/7. With government granted franchises, rubber stamped consolidation and bad joke anti-trust enforcement big company perception is not that far from reality. Shutting down online expression is both an exercise and enhancer of corporate power, just as book burning and other forms of censorship have been.
If your company is like this, do yourself a favor and quit.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
Now if employers terminate people unreasonably for being part of a political organization, due to their ethnicity or religion or for some other discriminatory reason the existing legal protection needs to come into play (as is the case of Stacy Snyder mentioned in TFA - terminating someone for being seen with a large glass of alcohol is moronic - that said she's better off with a different employer if that's how her current one acts). We don't need new special laws for the Internet. We may need minor adjustments to existing laws to take the Internet into account. We certainly don't need special protection for morons be they employer or employee.
Are we really suppose to have sympathy for morons who don't know what they put on the net is public?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You go to a lot of trouble to explain what employers should and shouldn't be able to fire someone for doing, and then you go and call people who exercise these rights "morons". WTF?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wasn't this covered in a Boston Legal episode already? It was the one where the cross-dressing lawyer and his female friend did a singing and dancing routine that made its way to Youtube and he almost got fired.
Just because it wasn't possible before to know what you're employees are like is not only not the point, it's also very much the point. On the first note, more information is a good thing. And you if can discover that your employee is whatever you consider weird, you're welcome to stop working with them. On the second note, if you can discover that your employee is whatever you consider weird, so can your clients. A public face is a public face, and if an employee intends to work in a job where that face matters -- i.e. the face of the company -- then yes, their on-line activities count just as much as their off-line activities.
My father taught me this when I was six, and it rings true here. At a baseball game, some reporter was going around asking for public opinion regarding some baseball issue. My father denied the interview saying that he was the officer of a public communications company, and should not be presented publicly by this reporter; even on a matter as unrelated as his opinions on baseball.
Now, I own and operate my own company. And yes, I look for good people to work with me. You'd beter believe I want them to be good people all-around. Their welcome to vent to me, and they can insult me to my face all they like. They can insult my clients to my face as well. But when they do anything that my clients can see, or to which my clients have access, they had better conduct themselves in a manner that I deem suitable.
Right or wrong, if my client says that they don't like my employee, I take that very seriously. Accidents and general human error are acceptable in moderation. Disregard for my business -- even during off-hours -- is completely unacceptable.
In my perspective, many employees (I don't mean only mine, I do in fact include many of my friends that work for others) consider their employment to be a right. No matter how good you are at your job, your employor has invested way more time and way more effort, and way more RISK into the business than you'll ever even consider for as long as you're an employee.
You don't deserve squat -- that's why you get nothing but money for your time. You work is appreciated, but the intelectual property isn't yours, and the risk wasn't yours, and the value-rewards won't be yours. The clients aren't yours, the company isn't yours. There's an enormous risk in starting your own business, and it's a gigantic under-taking to maintain any business. Being a cog in the machine is worth the grease, and little more.
My father would come home, after long days of negotiating some government contract for the communication company for which he worked. After a successful victory, he'd boast to his wife how he'd saved the company millions of dollars. She'd turn to him and say: "so, how much of it is ours?". Of course the answer is zero. That was his job, he did it well, he got paid as expected, plus or minus an annual bonus. The given victory meant nothing financially.
Know that when you work for someone else, you get to avoid the many headaches that go into running a business and being accountable to an entity that you've created. Also know that when you go out on your own, you deserve all of the glory, credit, blame, and defeat.
Please bring written copies of all jokes performed privately or publicly since the beginning of your employment at this firm, and a listing of dates of any public and/or private performances, including but not limited to performances at comedy clubs, television shows, and standing around in bars telling jokes to your buddies. Thank you very much for your prompt attention to this matter.
Sincerely, HR Department, Megacorp
You don't even need internet to get fired for what you do off job.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2005-02-16-pregnancy-bias-usat_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-22-pregnant-teacher_x.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4636907.stm
http://businessshrink.biz/psychologyofbusiness/2007/09/27/employees-fired-and-fined-for-smoking-obesity-and-blood-test-results/http://www.digg.com/health/Employees_getting_fired_for_smoking_or_being_obese
http://www.workerscompinsider.com/archives/000587.html
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/11/30/off_the_job_smoker_sues_over_firing/
http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-28029.html
google for more
On the one hand, I have very little posted under my real name, and what I do is just general responses on tech forums. I don't have a myspace page; I have photos but they are on a home webserver. Probably based on my posts, people could tell I use Linux, don't like Windows, and don't like Apple's attitude (but forced to chose between Windows and OSX, would chose OSX.) If they saw the photos they could tell where I've gone on a few vacations.
On the other hand, it's simply none of the employer's business what happens off-hours. In the case the NYTimes uses as an example, I hope she wins. A single photo of someone drinking..something.. is not a big deal, and the other excuse of a "well-groomed and dressed" rule is ridiculous -- this obviously means at work. If they mean 24x7, employees would have to stay dressed while asleep, and have their face waxed so they don't get 6 o'clock shadow while they sleep.
I know for a fact *I* wouldn't be fired for that kind of photo. At work, people at my work are casual but reasonably professional. Off work, they drink, some people I used to work with got into barfights like every weekend, they smoke pot, a few have done 8-balls now and then, a few have been into tatoos, knives, and guns. People don't drink, do drugs, fight, or play with guns and knives at work, so what they do offtime is simply irrelevant, period. That's the way it's supposed to be.
I want to quote this first:
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.I agree that "conflicts of interests" as mentioned above do have a right to be known to employers. However, when does this stop becoming an genuine effort to root out the so-called "stripper teacher," and become an threadbare excuse to fire someone for lack of conformity? Let me illustrate. I am always 110% work appropriate when I am on the job, however in my off hours I wear alot of piercings, I show tattoos, I like to go out and have drinks and hang with friends. There is, with today's digital camera boom, a good chance pictures will be taken of these activities in my off time. Now, if the place I work for is generally church going, khaki and polo button down straight edge family types, they might absolutely abhor my personal life, even though I don't bring it to work. Now the issue becomes, "if one worker doesn't fit the company image in and out of work, cut him loose." Can you see how easy the line between business interest and privacy can get blurred and abused? It feels like a door for socialized work places(sans government). Maybe I make a slightly paranoid case, but self expression is highly important to me; I'd hate to live half a life for fear of losing my job.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Woe be to the company that takes an action against someone for whom they find negative information which was put up by someone else. Such "sociological offices" would be highly unlikely to be able to prove the true source of the posting. IP spoofing is ridiculously easy. Someone who loses their job over such unproven and unprovable data (except by a truly exceptional forensic sysadmin) could have a fine time collecting on a wrongful termination suit, and take the "sociological office" weasels down in the process, and ruining the stock price of of the company by pushing the story onto the media by playing the aggrieved little guy with a little overacting.
To someone even minimally trained in psycops and IP diddling for whom such stuff appears, it should occur that one couple protect themselves from such an action by posting equally off the wall junk, spoofing the IP to hide the fact they posted it themselves, to bait the boneheads trying to make a case. Posting some equally disturbing info about these who're performing the the search would let them know they've been bested in such a way that they dare not continue without outting themselves on the process. One can even make it obvious but unprovable who did it (or had it done for them) without the hyperactive little HR people being able to do anything about it, except perhaps admit they're not good enough at this for the company to use their services, possibly even getting them cut from the salary list.
The best defense if a good offense. The best offense here is to make them publicly shove proof of their own inadequacy up their own ass. A person could have enormous fun and possibly set themselves up for a healthy early retirement. Getting the fsckheads who tried to out you fired would just be icing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
He didn't call people who exorcise their rights "morons". He said that people who don't understand that the Internet is public are put their shit on it are morons.
The Idea that someone would post something trashing their current job and then expect that no one connected to the job would ever see it is moronic.
I find that their sense of ethics is usually quite impaired.
Have gnu, will travel.
Two of the three examples you cite are about people who have been convicted of a crime. Convict status is something you don't need the Internet to find out and is something where there is a legal reduction in rights. The third example of a teacher moonlighting as an actor or model for pornography is rather an extreme and (I believe intentionally) inflammatory example. It is by necessity a public profession and one in which participation could be revealed even if no Internet existed.
Where I live, the state of Georgia here in the USA, your employer has the right to terminate you for any reason whatsoever (excepting of course discriminatory reasons based on minority, religious, veteran or disabled status) or without cause. So its not about the right of your employer to terminate. Its about the wisdom of terminating someone based on something you found out about them online. Any competent manager should be able to tell whether you are doing your job well or not, without the aid of facebook photos showing your drinking, getting high, or snorting coke off a strippers tits. If you can do your job, why should it matter what you put on the net?
You seem really fond of the word moron and its variants which you use thrice in your post. It of course refers to someone with diminished intelligence. So in response to your question, should I have sympathy for someone who has limited intellectual faculties, my response is yes. Of course, I do. What kind of monster are you that you don't?! But perhaps your repeated use of moron and variants is an indication of your own limitations, in this case of vocabulary. Maybe you meant to describe the individuals as foolhardy, naive, ignorant... In all of these cases, I still have sympathy for them. Everyone makes mistakes, but the Internet can trap those mistakes indefinitely like a fly in amber. Preserved for who knows how long... It is a major shift from a time when even the most celebrated of mistakes a person might make would fade in the collective memory and only diligent searching of newspaper archives, public records, and other references would uncover it.
I think your callous dismissal of the serious issue raised here is unwarranted. If anything it contributes to the ignorance that your deride (inaccurately with the word 'moron'). You suggest that people should already be aware of an issue at the same time you mock the fact that the issue is even being discussed. Obviously, given that people are ignorant of it, it needs to be discussed more, not less!
Ok, myminicity .com assholes. Playtime is over.
.com people hopefully more traffic than they were bargaining for.
I've really had it with the myminicity.com crowd, and to put a stop to this nonsense I've set up a little website.
Stop posting your myminicity links here and elsewhere, if myminicity.com wants to grow they can surely find a way to do it without inconveniencing others.
If you don't then I'm calling on the rest of the audience here to report those links to the site above and if they want to help a little further to place a 1 pixel image tag on their website which will give the myminicity
For starters I've placed one on http://ww.com/ , feel free to come and help.
This is just another spam wave and if this doesn't get stopped now then it will be seen as a vindication of the principle and before long there will be 100's of sites doing this.
Rewarding your users for bad behaviour has to be one of the most annoying marketing tactics that has ever been devised.
MP3 Search Engine
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.
If I'm employing a salaried worker, then they're never "off the clock." When they're thinking about work, that's work I'm employing them to do. I own their ideas because they are my employee, and that's how work-for-hire works.
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
If potential employees didn't like this behavior, then they wouldn't interview or accept offers from my company. That's just how the free market works, and since people do work for me, that shows they don't have any problems with this arrangement. The free market works again! And anyway, they posted the things online, so they gave up any privacy, so they should just accept the consequences.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
* * *
Of course, I was being sarcastic, but I fully expect there to be multiple posts that reiterate these ideas, only for real. There are plenty of people in today's America that want to essentially repeal the 20th century. I strongly suspect because there are people that for whatever reason, never saw power they didn't like, because they have the delusional belief that someday they will have that power.
Employers can read your email because they own the network. However they can't listen into your phone calls, even though they own the phones. The difference? One law was passed in the 30s or 40s. The other in the 90s.
The lassie faire free market capitalism is model. Nothing more. It's an ideal model, not unlike ideal wires in electrical engineering. They don't exist. The perfect market doesn't exist, because it hinges on perfect information, which doesn't exist. The market doesn't capture lots of things, namely pretty much everything that doesn't have a directly quantifiable cost. Even if you could assign a cost to these things, which you can't, the market doesn't necessarily work fast enough.
It is probably better this way because if you "protect" the employment relationship (like Europe), you basically make employers very fearful of hiring anyone. That also produces a very immobile, unflexible and fearful workforce.
The real reason employers don't act arbitrarily in most cases is pure self-interest: it is risky and hard to train and integrate new employees. A dismissal that others think is wrong is likely to very negatively affect morale in the remaining employees and is very ill-advised unless you believe they are all slackers and you want to axe the whole dept.
No one cares what you do in your off time. No really they don't. But if you're going to perform watersports on a dog, while licking ice cream off an asian prostitute, while sodomizing a bum, at least put it under an alias.
The shit people do and then link to their name is ridiculous. If I post something under my given name that can reflect badly onto me and the company I work for. Now at the same time if I post something under a pseudonym (kinglink is one) then that at least should not be considered the same thing. However at the same time if I link my account to my last name in any way (signing a post with my real name?) then again that becomes public knowledge. My company likely knows kinglink is me, that's fine I'm not betraying my company I'm not being stupid, I'm not trying to hide who I am, but the minute I would need to believe me, Kinglink will not be the name I try that with.
At the very least let's all realize that the internet is here to stay. So it's fine to post a picture of you as a fairy in a pride parade. But at the same time also realize someone searching for your information is likely to find and can and will make opinions on you or your background based on it.
Oh and a little hint, if you're playing hooky, and you take pictures DONT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK OR ANYTHING LINKED TO YOU! There's too many stories about this with people getting busted. Or again at the very least tamper with the date and time on your camera before you take your pictures.
The point about lawyers flexing laws is pretty much legit, as is the observation that laws have consequences, some of which may expose you to negative impacts in running a business. The question is whether or not the goods they're crafted to bring about are worth it.
I'd agree that requiring employers to make allowances that mean they need to consider a single man and mother equally means there may be calculable drag on employers. That by itself doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it simply means there's no such thing as a free lunch. The question is if that's the best place to pay/way for the problem of mothers who don't have sufficient incomes in their households, and if it's by and large an acceptable tradeoff.
In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power"
I'd argue that it's also better to have a society that doesn't discriminate based on religion than it is to have businesses at peak efficiency, too, but that's not really relevant to your statement. Because you're not talking about operating a peak efficiency -- any development schedule that can't accommodate up to a dozen holidays a year and a weekly sabbath of some kind (whether spent in piety or revelry or somewhere in between) is already screwed up, likely negatively influenced by fatigue and diminishing returns, and it ought to scare off any developer with good sense, who ought to run hard and fast unless you're offering some unusually good compensation.
Even if, however, the documentation fell the other way, it's possible that the good done by encouraging a society that doesn't discriminate based on religious belief might outweigh the business economic case.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
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.
who says it was me (I) who put that video up?
Here I am, enjoying my drunken rave - having a great time, I even leave my phone at home.. no disturbances for me this new years' eve.. just me, my friends, that cute girl I met and jello shots.
A week later, I get fired, because my boss saw a video of it.. turns out the girl was his niece; go fig. Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video.
Not everything is a "babysitter caught doing drugs", but may still be something you don't really want to share with the world for whatever reason; but you don't always have a say in this yourself.
So the solution is not so simple; unless you're saying that the real simple solution is to live puritan life 24/7 so that there is never a chance of anybody, anywhere, catching you doing things that might be perfectly acceptable in the situation you were in, but perhaps not so acceptable to your employer.. parents.. whoever/whatever.
A few weeks later your boss calls you in her office and wants to know why there are photos of you posted on the internet in which you are obviously drunk, with beer in one hand and a drunken floosy in the other. You and her are clearly making sexual gestures, a joke at the time, but unfortunately the punchline is lost in the photo. Worse yet, you're doing it while wearing a baseball cap bearing the corporate logo. You say "but, I don't know those got on the net".
Later, you find out your friend (or co-worker) Y was snapping photos with his cell phone and posted them to his myspace account. You curse him as you pack your cardboard box and promptly escorted from the building.
Morale of the story. Not everyone has the power to prevent others publishing information about you, be it text, photos or videos. It can happen, has happened, and will continue to happen. Your post was far from "insightful"; it was merely ignorant and unsympathetic.
Oh yes, ever heard of dontdatehimgirl.com? I'm sure your future boss will appreciate reading all about you upon googling your name and finding all the dirt your ex-girlfriend spilled on you. Have fun with the job search.
Camping on quad since 1996.
'You're not buying me, you're only hiring me.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman