Beware of digital dirt

With all the media talk about online governmental spying lately, a similar alarming issue involving private industry is starting to get some online traction.
Techdirt cites a recent study that shows more than a third of employers have eliminated a job candidate after digging up digital dirt through postings uncovered through online snooping of chat rooms, social networking sites like Facebook and blog postings.

The Techdirt blog has been all over this issue, too, noting that trolling Web sites and open groups where opinion is posted lets employers compose a digital record that can serve as your “inadvertent resume.”

I often teach a class to journalists on how to background people through the Internet and it’s amazing what we have found about school board presidents, corporate leaders, even the reporters themselves. Through search engine queries of discussuon groups and public data bases, we’ve easily uncovered political views, sexual proclivities and opinions about controversial social issues that provide a pretty comprehensive personality profile on the people we spot checked.

So it’s no surprise that corporate folks would do similar checks before investing in a new hire. And if they’re doing it, so, you can be sure, is the government.

It all gets back to what my Mom used to tell me: Don’t do or say anything that would embarass you if the whole town read about it in the newspaper tomorrow. On that Net that means that anything you post can usually be found by anybody. That is, afer all, why we call it the World Wide Web.