What if a future employer saw the stuff you did online?

Do you want your future employers seeing everything that you have done ever online? Most likely not. This does happen however. There are companies dedicated to finding out information about people using social networking. You should be afraid. You should be very afraid.

Can you really trust Facebook’s privacy settings to protect you? Can you really stop someone from seeing something you don’t want them to online?

It just takes one glitch in the system. One hack and all your information is free for everyone to see. You could be being watched right now by one of these companies hired to investigate people. They could be looking at your old myspace account you forgot about with the pictures of you punching out your cat. Or they could look up your old livejournal where you talked about how you weren’t a big fan of people from Turkey. If you’re trying to get a job as a Turkish veterinarian, those could be nails in your coffin!

What can you do about this?

You could up your Facebook privacy settings all the way up and hope to God, Allah, Zeus, and Xenu that they are never broken. You could panic and search for everything you’ve done in the past decade online. You could try and delete every last trace. There’s still no telling if anyone saved any of that or if it was archived on another site.

Or you could just not care like I do. While it would dishearten me if I didn’t get a job because somebody read this blog, I’m not going to go crazy about it. I’d rather have all those things online then go around deleting past things that I have done. It’s much more fun to be able to talk openly about tipocrites and tell stories than it would be to create a workfriendly blog.

I really hope some company is watching what I do online. They’d get to read all the silliness I’ve done over the years. They’d at least get a chuckle before denying my application. And that’s what I’m all about giving out smiles.

Cynical Smiles.