Read and heed

Friday, February 12, 2010

Well, here’s some advice that an awful lot of people are going to ignore: Don’t put anything on Facebook, or other social networking accounts, that you don’t want your current or future employers to see.

In the vernacular: Well, duh! Except people do it all the time, according to Ron Schneider, a lawyer who recently led a seminar in Bedford about the issue as part of the Bernstein Shur Labor and Employment Group’s series called “Avoid the Unexpected, Know the Rules.” It was held at SERESC in Bedford.

A major problem, he said, is that sometimes people will post something that clearly identifies where they work or, worse, will criticize their employer on what they foolishly presume is a protected account.

Not so.

You put it there; it’s there for anyone to find, according to Schneider.

Of course, we’ve known for many years that anything you stick on the Web, even if you send an e-mail to a friend, can be found. We might not all know how to find it – we’re not all techies – but somebody does and somebody will. That you can believe.

Here’s a true story from the annals of this newspaper: Several years ago, one of our production people was sitting at her computer. Suddenly, for reasons we have never been able to explain, thousands of e-mails – some of them from a few years before – popped up on her computer screen. She hadn’t been searching for them, she had no idea what she did to get them and she certainly didn’t want them. How did they come back from the Web nebula? We never found out. But had she had the time and the inclination, she could have gone through them and found … who knows what? Can we have assumed that we had all been circumspect in what we wrote? Not a chance.

That is all too true today. People post all kinds of weird things on their networking accounts, including embarrassing photos that could, and very well might, come back to haunt them.

“So, Ms. Jones, when you come to work at our bank, will you be wearing the bikini and the peanut butter in your hair that you had on when you posted THIS PHOTO?” Oops. No job for you, Ms. Jones.

Worse, though, is in store for the people who decide to post negative comments about the company for which they work. Bad. Dumb. Dangerous. We’re not sure what the odds are of being found out, but Schneider, in Bedford, suggested strongly that it is much better to post nothing than to post something that could get you canned.

“People need to know that if you go on your Facebook page and are saying discriminatory things about the company, that they can’t do that. You can tolerate that out at the bar, but you can’t tolerate them posting that on the Internet for all to see.” His advice? Just don’t do it.

Will people take it?

Some, sure.

Most? Nah.