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How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 30, 2007 10:25 PM
from the it's-easy-if-you-know-how dept.
from the it's-easy-if-you-know-how dept.
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?
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Hmmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that the companies are justified in disciplining workers for off-job activities, but that it's a much stickier situation than just "corporate fascist bastards bringin' me down".
Parent
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face facts: We get a lot of our stuff from China. China makes little kids work in sweatshops so they can make this stuff cheap. The average American doesn't give a rat's ass about what employees do on or off the clock as long as they can get what they want for cheap.
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Commerce is partially a social interaction, and economic prosperity is largely dependent upon successful commerce. If you repulse your potential customers (or other such profitable interactors) by way of your public speech or stances, you will be less able or likely to commit successful commercial transactions, and will find yourself economically disadvantaged. That's just the fact of a free market.
If you are an employee, depending on your role and its visibility, your advancement may be based on how well you sympathize with and reflect the important values of your employer. After all, a group of people who are all ideologically opposed but supposedly working together is a recipe for failure. Luckily, since free enterprise is legal, and you cannot be outrightly prohibited from changing your job, field, or marketing strategy (depending on who or what you are), you can take your free-speakin' self into the free market and see how well your ideologically-charged business flies among more sympathetic souls. (Granted, this is a less-than-perfect rendition in real life, given that there are monopolies and barriers-to-entry to some fields... call it "implementation hurdles")
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Things are different if you have actual company secrets, or if you're a corporate official. But in that case, you're hired EXACTLY to tell the company what you think.
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think I want you to be allowed to vote.
Parent
now hold on just one minute.. who says it was me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A paragraph from the cited article:
Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only "for cause." The rest of us are "at will" employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.
.
And for this, you can thank those who deride unions as "corrupt organizations, whose sole purpose was to aggrandize the union bosses".
Yes, the statement may be true in some cases, but they did protect their covered employees from the "at will" horseshit. I worked for a company whose new management put the employee manual online on the intranet. Cute trick -- before you could look at what the provisions were, you had to click on a box following a statement saying that you agreed that you were an "at will" employee and could be dismissed at any time for any reason.
Union employees could have told the company to stick the intranet up their asses and to provide a written, dated statement of employee rights and responsibilities.
Most of you nerds should keep in ming that you're on call 24/7 or are working 50 to 60 hour weeks because those fine folks in your parents' generation who fought bloody battles for the 40-hour work week have been cast aside as "productivity-robbing parasites".
As an exercise, everyone in an "exempt" position should divide their yearly salary by the appropriate number to see what their actual hourly wage is.
I once was awarded a check large enough to be worth $500 after taxes for work "above and beyond" on a certain project. It felt nice until I added up the extra hours I'd put in and found out the cocksucking bastards had gotten me to work for about five dollars an hour.
Goddamned self-serving pricks.
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You can still make an effort (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You can still make an effort (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You can still make an effort (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:You can still make an effort (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately, you are not limited to two online identities (the real and the pen name.) You can have as many as you want, and use them in proper spheres. You can be one on /., another on music forums, yet another on car enthusiasts' forums, and yet another, the real one, for official use. This will allow you to separate your technical opinions from your political or musical interests, and to prevent cross-contamination of your opinion on Urusei Yatsura [wikipedia.org] with your comments about Ron Paul [ronpaul2008.com], for example.
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you
Sure, they can find someone known as foobar123 on Ford forums just as easy as otaku456 on manga forums. Nobody needs to know more, unless you choose to tell someone.
"job security" has always been an illusion
Still there is no good reason to be a witness against yourself. In many cases if the real name of the poster is not known, it will remain not known (unless there is a really serious, legal or security-related need to find that out.) Besides, how does it matter to me what your real name is? Your name is whatever you tell me, and that's all I want to know. It's not like I'm planning to send you snail mail, for example. Your real name is of no use to me.
An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
In 99.999% of cases that person is bad at home and just as bad at work. If you can find someone who is Dr. Jekyll at work and Mr. Hyde at home, he is an exceptional actor. There are people like that, especially among criminals, but that's not what we are talking about here. If such a criminal is working as your cashier you won't hear a single bad word about him until he steals everything you have; he'd be excellent at work and at home until that last moment.
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.
Of course, it implies that you have to sacrifice your job just so you can openly display something that the company - an amorphous, amoral, collective entity - has no need to know to begin with. Sounds like a bad deal to me, in terms of gain vs. reward. When I work for someone I sell my labor, not my soul.
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Always use an alias. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:5, Interesting)
Should I pay for chasing my dreams?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
I have a profile on linkedin.com which includes a highly fictional Bio (I invented rope and television, and taught myself how to hover, for instance). Since I added that 2 or 3 months ago, I've had more direct emails from linkedin members asking me if I'm looking for work than I had in several years previously. Some people don't value a sense of humor but, for me, it's important to know that the people I hire not only can do the job, but they're someone I want to hang out with 40-50 hours a week.
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Should I pay for chasing my dreams? (Score:3, Funny)
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
Whoa (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
So, what you're TRYING to say is.. (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/29/jim-chomas-career-joins-the-deadpool-maybe/ [techcrunch.com]
Better tell that dude.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
i would just like to say that (Score:3, Funny)
(looks over shoulder)
that uh...
i'll tell you later, gotta go
More like how to lose your job cause you're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Laws have consequences, which may or may not suck (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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Control - Military Style (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Boston Legal (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, no kidding! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:4, Insightful)
You treat them like shit they'll do shit work. It'll be nice looking shit because you've told them that appearance is all that matters. But it'll still be shit.
A company is a collaboration of everyone working together as a team. *everyone* takes risks and *everyone* shares in the rewards. The boss has the highest potential reward (and the highest potential loss) but it's not *their* company exclusively because they couldn't possibly do everything on their own. They needed the employees. Not slaves, as you seem to believe.
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Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
The market value of my stock and options currently equals two years of my salary, and that is with the price being hammered by distressed institutional investors. If I help deliver new products that impress investors, it goes straight to my personal bottom line.
Not with a bad reference, or termination-for-mistake on the resume.
Somebody should tell that to the scientists and engineers I work with, who have been known to invent new lines of business and start spin-off companies.
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Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
And we wonder where loyalty went? With this attitude you'll get the employees you deserve.
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Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give your employees a vested interest in the success of your business then employee productivity will be much greater than if you treat them like "cogs."
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Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you ever wonder why you're resented and hated by your employees, this is why. When you wonder why the employee loyalty your business needs (or you even crave) isn't there, this is the reason. You look at people as cogs in your machine and not fellows. They're there to be exploited and not to be part of the company.
A business isn't one man or one man's risk no matter how much you'd like to put it in those terms. Your business belongs not only to you, but to everyone who works for you.
Let's put it in realistic terms. Your client has a relationship with your company, and not just with you. He has a relationship with the salesmen who talk to him, the support people he calls when he's got a problem, and the people who manufactures the product he's buying.
When you eliminate any one of those people for anything but the most important of reasons (no, not profit. The long-term survival of your company is what your eyes SHOULD be focused on) you are diminishing your company's relationship with that client.
When your client says he has a problem with a single member of that team, you need to think long and hard about why. Is your client prejudiced? Is your client sane? More importantly, is your client looking out for your company's best interests? Almost certainly not.
Don't agree? Fire your important employees and replace their jobs with cheaper, less-experienced people. 'Outsource' if you dare. Watch your clients start to complain. Their money is about to go elsewhere.
Instead, why don't you learn to treat your employees as not only cogs in a machine, but individual people with cares and concerns of their own who are also important parts of your company? Your company's long-term health will show you the value of that. Profit will follow.
Parent
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
You don't even need internet to get fired for off. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2005-02-16-pregnancy-bias-usat_x.htm [usatoday.com]
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-22-pregnant-teacher_x.htm [usatoday.com]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4636907.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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 [businessshrink.biz]
http://www.workerscompinsider.com/archives/000587.html [workerscompinsider.com]
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/11/30/off_the_job_smoker_sues_over_firing/ [boston.com]
http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-28029.html [thehighroad.org]
google for more
Where to draw the line, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to quote this first:
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.
The Burden of Proof (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Contradicton (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that their sense of ethics is usually quite impaired.
salaried == always on the clock (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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. [salon.com]
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.
Let's make this simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
screwmyminicity.com (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [screwmyminicity.com]
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/ [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.
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Re:Company image...to an extent (Score:5, Interesting)
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