Controlling internet forums
- From: "Harry Thompson" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2007 07:44:38 -0600
But we knew this didn't we?
Compare this control of internet forums with China's.
========================
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html
December 30, 2007
How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time
By RANDALL STROSS
WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be
delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express
themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of
employees.
In his day, 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."
Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet
to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous
"professional" standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your
job.
Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are
punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer
at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are
workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special
protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be
dismissed only "for cause." The rest of us are "at will" employees, holding
on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.
A line needs to be drawn - Day-Glo bright - that demarcates the boundary
between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have
every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after
hours, as long as no laws are broken, is none of the company's business. Of
course, what we used to call "off hours" are fewer now, and employees may
connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go off the clock
and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be
of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes
some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously
possible.
In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or
even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have
career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at
Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example.
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.
Her photo, preserved at the "Wired Campus" blog of the Chronicle of Higher
Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at
a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate's hat perched atop her head, sips
from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the
photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait "drunken pirate," though
whether she was serious can't be determined by looking at the photo.
Millersville University, in a motion asking the court to dismiss the case,
contends that Ms. Snyder's student teaching had been unsatisfactory for many
reasons. But it affirms that she was dismissed and barred from re-entering
the school shortly after the high school staff discovered her MySpace
photograph. The university backed the school authorities' contentions that
her posting was "unprofessional" and might "promote under-age drinking." It
also cited a passage in the teacher's handbook that said staff members are
"to be well-groomed and appropriately dressed."
MR. LENARD said last week that protections for employees for off-duty
behavior varied widely from state to state. Colorado and Minnesota have laws
explicitly protecting all employees from discrimination for engaging in any
lawful activity off premises during nonworking hours. In other states, like
Pennsylvania, where Ms. Snyder lives, such protection doesn't exist.
What some employers regard as imprudent disclosure online may seem
commonplace to the rest of us. On Dec. 16, the Pew Internet and American
Life Project released the results of a study, "Digital Footprints," showing
that 60 percent of Internet users surveyed are not worried about how much
information is available about them online.
The findings reflect a significant change within just a few years in public
attitudes about privacy and disclosure. In an earlier Pew study, "Trust and
Privacy Online," published in 2000, some 84 percent of respondents expressed
concern about "businesses and people you don't know getting personal
information about you and your family."
Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project and an author of both
the 2000 and 2007 surveys, told me that she was surprised by the reduced
concern about online publication of personal information. Internet users are
not just passively allowing personal information to slip from their control
and end up online, where it is searchable; they are also actively putting
the information online themselves. The "Digital Footprints" study coined a
new phrase, "active digital footprint," to refer to the personal information
that individuals increasingly place online voluntarily.
Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew
study included an unexpected finding: 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.
Tight privacy settings won't always keep personal information placed on
social networking sites safe from an employers' prying eyes. A manager could
literally look over your shoulder or afterward check a history of sites you
visited.
Ms. Snyder had not adjusted her MySpace privacy settings to restrict public
access, but why should she have done so? She anticipated that her profile
page would be seen by school authorities. On it she declared that as an
adult, over the age of 21, she believed that "I have nothing to hide."
The day may come when nothing that is said online will be treated as
embarrassing because we will have become accustomed to everyone disclosing
everything. The Pew study phrases this possibility as a question: "Will we
come to be more forgiving of embarrassing or unflattering information trails
as more of us have our own experiences with personal data leftovers gone
bad?"
In the interim, some people will be more cautious than Ms. Snyder. Ms. Fox
of the Pew project recently paid a visit to New Orleans for a bachelorette
party with female friends - husbands not included. She wanted to make sure
that details of the festivities did not find their way to the Internet. She
instructed her friends: "If you're going to upload the pictures, don't tag
with real names." The photos went up, without traceable digital
fingerprints.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of
business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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