Who isn't on Facebook these days? The site has something like 500 million users, and is growing rapidly. There have been 4 billion tweets posted on Twitter. Posting a picture of yourself on Myspace or Facebook with a drink and tabbing it "Drunken Pirate" might make your friends laugh. But it could also get you fired, as this Lancaster teacher found out. Drunken pirate. Employers are increasingly searching the web to monitor employee activities while they are off duty, and firing them if they don't like the activity. As Molly DiBianca notes in her blog, one woman was fired for her anonymous sex blog after a supervisor searched the internet and found an unrelated Twitter account that revealed her name. Sex blogger fired
You might think you are safe using Facebook -- after all, it has privacy settings so only your "friends" can see what you post. But who knows what those friends will do with the information? I had an arbitration once where the employer brought in a bunch of employee posts that her workplace colleague and Facebook "friend" had given the employer.
Even if your friends don't rat you out, employers can be very aggressive in litigation, and may subpoena all Facebook postings, and also subpoena your friends to get to your postings. Management lawyer Eric B. Mayer gleefully advises employers in this blog post all the different ways to get to your private information, from subpoenas to figuring out who your FB friends are and seeing if they are work colleagues, to asking for sanctions for spoilation. Mayer post here.
Forewarned is forearmed. The basic rule for FB, as well as all internet activity is not to put anything out there that you wouldn't want your grandmother to see. Big brother is watching.
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