"If it's in the public domain, it's fair game"

There are a lot of young adults, as well as some not so young ones, who have been learning a hard lesson: anything posted on a public site is going to be searchable by their next possible employer .  Most people fail to realize that most web sites are like the streets in a major city: everyone can see what you're doing, you never know who may be watching and you don't know if someone's recording what you're doing for the future.  An employer doing a Google search on a potential employee is no more an invasion of privacy than someone snapping your picture on the street.  Everything you post on a public site is exactly that, public.

Facebook, Youtube and the whole social networking sphere have brought a new era of accessibility to personal information that never existed before.  Five years ago, if you wanted to know what someone did at a college party, you had to hire a private investigator to talk to the people who had been there, an expensive, time-consuming process.  Now a couple of minutes with a search engine will reveal the same information, along with pictures, video and commentary from twenty of the people who were at the event.  Even if the original files and pages are removed, they'll often still be discoverable thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine.  Once something's on the Net, it's there to stay.

Expecting a potential employer to treat such an easily reviewed resource as private information is naive; companies owe it to themselves to do everything they can to screen undesirable employees out of the hiring process as much as possible.  This used to mean a background check, a credit report and maybe a drug test.  Now that background check has been expanded to include an extra thirty minute search using Google and Yahoo.  Have you ever done a vanity search on yourself just to see what comes up on you?  If not, give it a try, you might be surprised what you find.  It will also give you an idea of what a potential employer might find.

I'm a big privacy advocate, but my idea of privacy starts with what I post to the Internet.  If I don't want something about myself or my family out on there, I don't post it and I ask others not to post it.  My privacy is first and foremost my responsibility.  I can't expect a social networking site to guard my privacy for me, since the whole point of these sites is to share information.  It's going to be a painful process for some of today's college students to learn:  they have to take responsibility for what they put on the Internet, not the search engines or social networking sites.  And definitely not a potential employer.