Pedro B

The issue of privacy is always coming up where the Internet is concerned.  Most times, if you interact on the world wide web at all, there is a good chance you can be found by someone looking for information on you.

I read an article that touches on how easy it is to find information on individuals on Robert Scoble’s blog yesterday where he talks about how to socially network if you are laid off.  Robert gives advice on how to present your online image effectively in order to get the job you want.  I find it interesting that his post only talks about cleaning up your image about and not trying to hide yourself online.  Basically he’s assuming you will be found and that you want to be found.

I know he’s a techy and using a geek mentality about this but honestly if I’m looking for a job I don’t want my employer to see me online.  The problem is we enter our name into everything.  I set up an account with LinkedIn sometime in the beggining of this year and have never logged in since but that is the first thing that shows up when I Google myself.  I know LinkedIn is geared towards networking but shouldn’t they warn you during registration that your name will be spidered and indexed by the search engines?  I don’t mean just the Terms of Service, I mean a big box I can check if I decide I don’t want my full name available.

Web users are becoming a bit to insensitive to online privacy.  If you use Google regularly (I do) then it pretty much knows everything about you.  What you buy, what you’re interests are, who you interact with.  It’s a sign of the times when a potential employer can go digging for dirt on you just by typing your name in to a Google field and hitting “Search.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Blogging, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.