Wed 14 Jun 2006
New York Times article on the (lack of) privacy on-line.
When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.
Tien Nguyen, a college senior, signed up for job interviews but said he was seldom contacted until he withdrew a satirical online essay.
At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate’s Web page with this description of his interests: “smokin’ blunts” (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.
There is no Williams mention in the article. (Shouldn’t the new head of OCC, John Noble, start schmoozing with reporters like Alan Finder?) But regular readers of the Record will recall this article from January.
A campus-wide investigation into illegal drug use in early January resulted in three male sophomore students being asked to take time off from Williams, the Record has learned. Dozens of others, some suspected of dealing marijuana, others of using, were called in to Campus Safety and Security to be questioned.
…
The investigation also involved, but was not limited to, inquiries on the Facebook.com, a popular Web site used by many students at Williams. According to student sources, the members of two Facebook groups in particular, “Puff, Puff, Pass” and “Phyllis Chandler Bong” were questioned about their extracurricular activities.
Great use of the term “extracurricular.”
I loved these quotes from the Times article.
“I never really considered that employers would do something like that,” he said. “I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades.”
Think again.
At a conference in late May, Mr. Devlin said, he asked 40 employers if they researched students online and every one said no.
What conference was that? Ditch diggers of America? I bet that 90%+ of the firms that recruit at places like Williams google applicants. Most probably do more.
Never put something on a computer that you wouldn’t be willing to see on the front page of the New York Times.
3 Responses to “Phyllis Chandler Bong”
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Good hyperbolic advice with respect to anything in writing placed by the writer anywhere!
The point of the Times article fully applies to Ephblog posters and readers, of course. Sadly, in the age of easy ID/tag tracing, it is generally not in one’s interest to leave random thoughts strewn about hyperspace. The judgment that these thoughts might be ‘random’ is, of course, in the eye of the reader — whoever she or he may be. We all have to assume the worst when we are dealing with a nameless void. This is probably one reason (of many other reasons) why Ephblog does not quite have the same level of activity as, say, WSO blogs.
So all I have to do to ruin a person’s job chances, is to create a false persona for them on MySpace…?
Thanks to D for informing me what a “blunt” is. I must be getting out of touch.