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09.10.07
Control Your Internet Appearance
 By Dan Morrill
You are what you have posted on the internet; the question is how do you manage your internet personality? As well as the eventual humiliation, that will follow.
Most people do not think before they write something, or if they do write something, it is filled with things that they might not be that proud of. I know of one poorly timed user comment, had to be erased from the system here and at their request. This ended up being a daylong exercise, and the commenter was quite serious about having their comments pulled before much more damage happened.
That also ended up creating new procedures that the web site had to take into place. The idea though that user comments can come back and haunt people is nothing new, Apophenia points out that:
In the last month, I've received almost a dozen panicked emails from people who had commented on my blog at one point or another and were horrified to find that their comment was at the top of Google's search for their name. In each case, I have respectfully altered the comment to an anonymous name. I prefer not to remove these comments because this leaves holes in my blog, especially when others' comments are based on those earlier comments. Unfortunately, most of these people do not understand how Google's cache works and write back in rage that it's not fixed. I politely try to inform them that Google's cache can take months to update and I cannot do anything to speed this up. Source: Apophenia
There are literally millions of examples of people who have written first, regretted later, we do this in e-mail at work, and we do it on line as well. Some of the more recent examples like the one on techwag where a person lost it over some spam, this will be part of his on line identity and legacy as long as Google cache exists, as well as this simple blog search, and some other postings here and here.
Overall though the advice that Apophenia offers is fairly strait forward, and while people might be horrified to find out that what they have posted to the internet might be frowned upon, the reality is that it is there, and the idea of making a separate identity, one that is just for on line use only makes sense.
For most people this is going to be a far too late kind of idea with MySpace and Facebook, but then it might not be a bad idea to start over from scratch and develop a new on line personality only and then set about repairing your on real on line identity. It is those comments though that are going to come back and those are the things that hiring managers are going to view.
Makes sense to start working out a way to manage your own on line identity now rather than later when you are trying to explain to a hiring manager why those are on the internet, or wondering why the phone is not ringing off the hook with fantastic job offers.
Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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