Is Your Employer Watching?

More and more we hear about people getting themselves into trouble by way of some online activity. Usually it revolves around some activity in real life that made its way through pictures onto the internet. Recently however, this view into our personal lives has begun to affect professional ones. The New York Times had an article titled “How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time” about how the private lives of employees are taking a toll on their employment status.
They had a funny, almost scary, note from the past. According to the story the Ford Motor Company

maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Today, they have one dude that tracks everyone on MySpace and Facebook. But seriously, should our offtime from our jobs effect our employment status ? Where is the line going to be drawn ? I mean everyone should be able to go out and blow off a little steam without getting fired. So what has happened ? The Internet and more importantly social networks. Our time away form work is now “documented” so to speak and put up for everyone to see. I am not saying it makes it right, that is just what has happened.

One prime example as to what can happen is a student from Millersville University in PA. According to the article

Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Something I found ironic form the post was that according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project is that

Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

Anyway, let it be a lesson to us all. No drinking and uploading … its the new drinking and dialing apparently.