I found this article which I thought was rather interesting and amusing. The moral of the story  being – be careful what you put on Facebook, MySpace, and on other Internet sites. Your interviewer or spouses divorce lawyer might well be checking you out!

by Kyle Smith

In the future, John Waters has predicted, the growth industries will be gay divorce and tattoo removal. But what’s even more embarrassing and indelible than a “Slippery When Wet” tattoo on a lumpy 52-year-old inner thigh? Social-networking photos and details. Today they’re fun. Tomorrow they’re info-tats.

A 2009 study concluded that 45% of employers were checking social-networking sites before deciding whether to hire someone. That’s shocking: only 45%? (A similar study the previous year reported that only 22% of employers were checking. Note the trend, and how quickly it’s moving.)

The news gets worse: of that 45% who bothered to check, 80% subsequently decided not to offer a job to someone based on info found on the sites. Facebook: the great job killer of the 21st century.

As an employer, you’re taking a chance when you hire someone. No one wants to hire a dud, but the stakes are larger than that. What if someone has a history of, say, posting rude sex jokes about women on his Facebook “wall” and turns out to be much the same around the coffee pot at work? No sex-harassment lawyer is going to fail to tell the jury that the company would have known it was making a hostile-workplace hire if only it had Googled Mr. Rufus T. Pervinator before putting him on the payroll.

The No. 1 reason not to hire someone discovered on social-networking sites, though, is “provocative or inappropriate photos.” A picture can be worth a thousand paychecks.

Facebook is also the new BFF of divorce lawyers, who called it their favorite place to find cyber-evidence in a survey this month. “Every client I’ve seen in the last six months had a Facebook page,” Ken Altshuler of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers told The Post, “and the first piece of advice I give them is to terminate their page immediately.”

[…]

Sure, post your secrets under a slightly different name known to only 500 of your friends. No risk of that ever leaking out!

[…]

Deleting Facebook information can be surprisingly complicated, too: The fine print of the site makes it easy to “deactivate” your account but deleting each cringemaking photo or confession requires additional steps. And thanks to cached searches, information remains findable to the Web-savvy long after the page it came from has been deleted.

It’s the age of TMI. But people learn, slowly. After another few years of being educated by their own promiscuity with information, oversharers might take a giant leap backward and become as coy, demure and modest as Victorian letter-writers. It’s almost conceivable that, in the future, people might get to know each other by meeting up for conversation.

Read the rest: Idiocy in the age of Facebook