The web means the end of forgetting

I was just discussing this subject with Ice9 the other night...

The web means the end of forgetting - link to the original NY times article.



Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
Ask the Experts

Michael Fertik, founder of ReputationDefender, and Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, take reader questions on Internet privacy on the Bits Blog.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

Read my stories!

OMG! ! ! If they record Jello Shooters we are all screwed!

This is the reason why my main has a MySpace/Facebook page, and there is zero personal information on them.

I hardly say anything about myself on my Facebook/MySpace (Hell, I barely check MySpace).

Even still, if somebody were to plug my name into Google, they find some OTHER guy with my name who's WAY younger and not in the same state.

Frankly, I'm actually SURPRISED there's another guy with my first and last name combination out there. Still, I'll go ahead and be happy that he takes the brunt of the investigations.

Sometimes I wish I could be that anonymous Having a weird name can have its drawbacks.

Personally if someone doesn't want to hire me for something I did or said after working hours, I probably don't want to work for them anyway.

That's where you sue for breach of contract.

Yeah she went about the lawsuit the wrong way, Freedom of Speech does not protect us from everything we say, do, or support. She should have gone the route of breach of contract with the school.

Wish I could find the source, but I remember hearing about a 20 something guy that was not allowed onto an airplane due to what his shirt said. They stated if he were to change his shirt they would have let him on, he of course stated that all his clothes were in his luggage and he refused to purchase another shirt from gift shop.

Basically he was denied flight and was not given a refund; he turned around and sued based on freedom of speech and lost, because the court ruled that it does not apply when flying and company policy took precedence.

Just keep in mind, do you have freedom of speech at work? If we did, there would never be any lost jobs over a wide variety of discussions that happen while working.

well that's stupid. If I lived in Canada I'd have been sued to oblivion by now. Course I get nauseous when I here schools banning games like tag, because someone has to be it and it usually is the slow person.

When I was the slow person, being it sucked, but you know what.... I got faster and then found a slower person than me.

Weiner Weiner.




Just felt like saying weiner.

While I feel that the woman in the article got a horribly unfair shake on this, it highlights what I've been saying in security and hacking circles for years.

Don't put ANYTHING on the net that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying/doing/reproducing in front of a law enforcement officer, your mother, a job interviewer, and/or your boss.

Contrary to popular belief, spewing every last insignificant piece of minutae about your life into a venue of potentially SIX BILLION VIEWERS is NOT a good thing.

Yes, 99.999% of them probably will never see it. Of those that do, 99.99% won't really give a damn. Of the fraction of a percent that's left, at least a few are probably people in there you don't want to expose that kind of info to. No matter how harmless it seems at the time.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.