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Personal information in the web

Sunday March 1st, 2009. 08:04 AM. [Job, Opinion]. 5 Comments.

From Seth Godin’ blog, a marketing 2.0 guru, (via microsiervos and meneame.net):

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, “binge drinking.”

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, “I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings.”

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Although there is information about us in Internet that we can’t control, there is information that we decide to put in Internet that can damage us. The hype of the social media, facebook, twitter, etc.  is making us to forget it.

Another recent example is a british teenager who was fired because saying in her Facebook page that her job is “totally boring”, even she didn’t name the company name.

This kind of stuff tell us that we should think twice what information we select to put in Internet, and what information should be kept in our personal circle. I don’t have still Facebook, MySpace or Twitter account due of this reason. But for example I have started to use LinkedIn because it is useful tool to find job and keep professional contacts, without going too far about personal information. All depends on how we use these tools.

Google never forgets.