Part of me wants to grab those employers and say, "Welcome to the real world, idiot." People do these things. People sharing photos of themselves having fun is fun for a lot of people, employers usually included. You can set MySpace profiles and Facebook profiles to varying levels of accessibility. Someone who spends enough time scanning for dirt on someone will probably find it, no matter who it is, if you search long enough. It's sort of like corporate culture is being shocked (or acting this way, for some reason) by what employees do off hours, which is none of their damned business, anyway.
Similar themes are workers getting fired when their blogs are discovered, and the blog happens to mention "Boy, work today sure did suck today," etc. Then the employee gets questioned the next day: "SO YOUR WORK SUCKS, HUH?" Gulp.
Fuck bosses that do this sort of nosey stuff. I hate it. What do *they* do on their off hours? Is everyone supposed to live like they're perpetually on the set of a Leave it to Beaver episode all the time? Lowest common denominator lifestyles, 24/7, for the panopticon?
If you've been posting on publicly-archived lists under your own name for years, and have articles, etc., voicing strong or controversial opinions, it's time to get into mind-fuck mode with these bosses/douchebags and leave trails of plausible deniability, with various pseudonyms, links to articles or profiles by people who happen to share the same name -- make it a real tangled web that's confusing for potential employers, or as they seem to me, stalkers. Act like you're a girlfriend being stalked by a perv who can't get over himself -- that's what you seem to have to do to buck these bosses' power. Act online as if you were in that situation, but your boss is the amorous, stalking pervert.
Someone showed a profile of some business school guy that also had the name Chuck Munson; one way to fuck with employers would be to create links to that profile from Chuck0's own pages. Left unsure, the employer might have to resort to -- judging the applicant by the actual qualifications on hand! Instead of muckraking. If they're even doing that.
Private lists shouldn't have this concern. (Though Hitchens and others have sleazily used posts from private lists to "out" people on certain issues.) We all know LBO is public and has been for years and years.
-B.
farmelantj at juno.com wrote:
"We are told that employers are starting to check those sites too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddZWkhItPuI"