Your employer may be spying on you more than you think - NYT

[MattSh]

How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 30, 2007

WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.

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In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html

[Mythsaje]

1. Corporate ownership. Isn't it grand? n/t