Career Risks You Take When You Share Your Life Online

What you post online can have serious ramifications for your career. I've said it before, I'm saying it again, and I'm pretty sure this won't be the last time I write about it. My hope is that people will listen and consider what they post on their social/professional networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I read and think a lot about this topic, so the CNN clip below caught my attention. Maybe it will catch yours too. It ranges in topics from Germany which is considering a restriction on the use of social network searches as part of their hiring practices, to percentages on how many employers use social networking sites to screen potential hires, to a Georgia teacher who was fired for photos she posted privately but which someone else copied and shared. It's worth four minutes of your time to watch it.

The moral of these stories? Nothing you post online, even to your super-locked-down-only-people-I-trust-with-my-life-can-see-it (and are you sure it's that locked down?) online profile/blog/etc. is ever truly private. So if you wouldn't want your current or future employer to see it, don't post it. It really is that simple.

Why We Can Never Educate Enough About Copyright and Online "Privacy"

Stumbled across this story on Yahoo! news this morning and thought it was a perfect example to use when trying to make the points to teachers and students that

1. Just because the picture is posted on the Internet does NOT mean you have permission to use it.
2. You give up control and privacy when you post anything on the Internet. Even if people aren't supposed to use your stuff without your permission, they still do and will.

The short synopsis is a family photo that a U.S. blogger posted on her blog and used on a few other sites like Facebook wound up being used for a life-size advertisement in a store window in the Chech Republic. Fortuntately this was a fairly innocent use of the photo, however, since it could bring profit to the store some money should have probably been made by the professional photographer who took the original photo and the family that was in it. Let alone maybe the family would like to have a say in what their likenesses are used to advertise?
For the full story, and for an example to share with teachers and students (or even just your friends who post things willy-nilly all over the web), check out these links:
Story of Stolen Picture at ExtraordinaryMommy.com
Yahoo! News Story