Legal Aspects
We live in an age when our lives are continuously being recorded on the Internet, an internet that can store unimaginable amounts of data, but gets rid of nothing. And while there are definitely benefits to this increase in our access to information, there are also costs coming from our loss of privacy.
According to a survey by Microsoft, 75% of US recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about their candidates. This "online research" includes looking at search engines, social-networking sites, photo/video sharing sites, personal Web sites/blogs, Twitter, and even online-gaming sites [2]. This is when data that seemed harmless when originally published, can come back to haunt us. In reality, if certain things that can portray a negative image about ourselves are posted on the web, where our potential or current employers can easily discover them, we might end up losing a lot more than what we originally gambled for.
Take the story of Stacy Snyder. She was a 25 year-old teacher in training when she posted a drunken photo of herself wearing a pirate hat on MySpace. While this might seem like nothing out of the norm for a 25 year-old, this action led Snyder to be denied her teaching degree just before graduation [2].
Unfortunately, this is not the only case where personal data found online has caused negative consequences to this degree, and with the web being able to store some data "forever", the problem is no longer as simple as "un-tagging" yourself from a Facebook photo.
The time when our identity on the internet was an escape from reality is gone, for we continuously have to worry about keeping a good reputation of our online selves. There have been many suggestions for achieving "digital forgiveness," such as allowing users to set expiration dates for photos and tweets, so that any posted data will delete itself after a period of time [2]. Other ideas consist of allowing people to declare "reputation bankruptcy," allowing an individual to re-start their online reputations [1]. However, one of the most taken approaches is to have an outside company, such as Pinstorm and Reputation Defender, handle a user's online reputation, where they make sure that if harmful data cannot be removed, it is harder to find, as it can arrange for data to be moved from a first Google search page, to the tenth [2].
While the general public is not yet in dire need of requesting the assistance of Reputation Defender, we must become more self-conscious of our online selves and be cautious when posting sensitive content on the web.
Resources:
Link [1] Rajaram, Sowmya. "CEOs of digital forgiveness." MidDay Infomedia Ltd. August 1, 2010.
Link [2] Rosen, Jeffrey. "The Web Means the End of Forgetting." New York Times Magazine. July 27 2010.
