A really good reason for using a handle on the Cellar

[richlevy]

So this new company is providing a service that will deliberately search the Internet and gather together and judge social media content.

And by judge I mean make conclusions based on those pictures. I wonder what they would make of Halloween pictures? If they saw a picture of someone cross-dressing for a costume party, would they assume that this indicates a lifestyle preference (I believe I recall a politician who got in trouble for this)? If someones wife or girlfriend were wearing a Sailor Moon costume, would they worry about pedophilia tendencies?

As far as the guys who have posted nude pictures of their wifes/girlfriends here, does that constitute a 'negative' post?

I realize that what we post in public is public. I also realize that people still do not understand that aggregating and archiving give an amazing amount of power and control over data.

I never posted 'crazy' pictures to my Facebook pages. I do wonder if my next employer will be handed a reprint of all of my Cellar posts. They are welcome to it. I consider using my real name on the Cellar a social experiment that pre-dates Facebook.

I do wonder about class distinctions when I read about articles like this. When companies talk about random drug tests and using services like this on employees and prospective employees, I think to myself "Really, all employees?" Because in any publicly held company, everyone is an employee, including senior management and the CEO.

I do wonder if they will deliberately break aliases/handles. Will they go out of their way to find out who Merc, Brianna, Wolf are?

I know in the past that some people here have given enough information about themselves to reveal themselves. I recently asked someone here who posted a picture relating to themselves if they intended to leave their name on it.

I guess the only protection everyone will have is if enough people do one or two stupid things that companies will have to ignore them or risk reducing their acceptable applicants to zero.


http://consumerist.com/2011/06/new-s...ven-years.html

The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online. For instance, this sample they provided was flagged for "Demonstrating potentially violent behavior" because of "flagrant display of weapons or bombs."
The FTC said that the file, which will last for up to seven years, does not violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The company also says that info in your file will be updated when you remove pictures from the social media sites. Forbes reports, "new employers who run searches through Social Intelligence won't have access to the materials if they are completely removed from the Internet."