Things you've said on the internet... Could they come back to haunt you?

[Intelsucks]

Since we live in a freakin' surveillance society these days, how long will it be before potential employers have the ability to "sift" through your past internet activities at will?

Immediately some people will say: "But they don't have the capability/technology to do that, so I'm not going to worry about it".

My answer to that is: Remember the days when anyone who carried a pager was an assumed drug dealer? Remember just a few years back when almost no one had a cell phone, and now almost everyone does? Remember when Intel said that they could see no reason for anyone ever needing a processor faster than 300MHz for anything? The point being that technology is moving much faster than we are.

I was looking for a good reason to use the tinfoil hat emoticon, and now I've finally got one!:tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat:


Your thoughts please...

[amazona]

1. they already have google

...and going back there was dejanews which could be easily searched for your posts. In fact, in the dejanews days it seemed it was easier for someone to go back and grab all your posts.

[Philostopher]

7. Google News has the old Deja archive.

I hear some people have been allowed to ask to have posts deleted because of personal litigation or national security (don't ask me -- I just read somewhere that Google would suppress some old Usenet posts with legitimate reason). Otherwise, though, Google News has the same archive DejaNews did before it went under.

[elperromagico]

2. I guess my whole "I like hookers and drugs" theme could

come back to haunt me.

[Wonk]

3. Old news, actually.

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.wired.com+Carnivore+surveillance

[leftofthedial]

4. every character

n/t

[Bush is a chimp]

5. Try this

Google your DU screen name and see what pops up you might be surprised.

[xJlM]

6. I keep my name OFF the internet

If I do a Google search for my actual name I get no results. I use Yahoo! mail for a lot of things, so I can be totally anonymous there. My main email doesn't even use my actual name, although it does my last name.

[JohnKleeb]

8. Yeah

Happened to me, remember when I had that weird IM y'all, well I was critical of my two friends, and then it turns out they were in the same room, I was set up :(.

[Melsky]

9. Yes

I read an article about how many employers do searches on people before hiring. It listed all the things employers had found, and decided not to hire the people, like they were planning on working for a few months and then blowing off the job or they had lies on their resume.

I use the name Melsky a lot for my business, and it is my nickname offline, so it's pretty easy to find the stuff I post here, if someone really wanted to. But I haven't said anything I'm ashamed of, and if someone is so upset that I think Bush is the worst president ever, I don't want them to own my art anyway.