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You said WHAT? Internet messages can come back to haunt senders
Personal lives become public on blogs accessible to eyes users never intended them for
By STEPHEN T. WATSON
News Staff Reporter
7/3/2006
Marcus Yam/Buffalo News
Lisa A. August of Buffalo State College's Career Development Center said the Internet can quickly make private thoughts very public.
We've all seen the errant e-mail - a profession of love, perhaps, or a criticism of a co-worker - that's sent to an entire workplace instead of the sole, intended recipient.
And Web logs that offer too much information on the writers' personal and work lives.
Or the profile pages on MySpace and Facebook that bristle with descriptions of the hosts' drunken misbehavior and nocturnal escapades - with photographic evidence, to boot.
It's clear people still haven't learned the basics of smart Internet behavior.
"Instead of putting your foot in your mouth, you're shoving your whole keyboard in there," said Jennifer Wutz-Lopes, a Lockport resident and computer systems analyst who hosts the blog Jen's 14,221 Thoughts.
But today, the repercussions can go far beyond just a modest dose of embarrassment.
Some companies have fired employees for writing critical comments on their personal blogs.
And employers are starting to search through MySpace, Facebook and other Web sites to find any online profiles set up by job candidates.
So college career-development officers are warning students to avoid posting photos or commentary that might scare off a company recruiter.
"What they don't understand is that it now becomes public domain, and you don't know who's going to read it," said Lisa A. August, associate director of Buffalo State College's Career Development Center.
They've found that - with apologies to Jimmy Buffett - the Internet is a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.
"The Internet, in my opinion, should be treated as a near-infinite time capsule," said Harvey S. Axlerod, the University at Buffalo's computer discipline officer. "Once you put [content] up, you have no control over it or who uses it."
People have always done embarrassing, or dumb, or scandalous things.
The difference in the Internet age is that now there's a record of these gaffes, and they can swiftly travel around the world.
Several years ago, when Wutz-Lopes was working at a health care company in Boston, Mass., an employee there inadvertently sent a love note intended for his office sweetheart to a full list of company supervisors.
"I didn't get the original e-mail, but it was forwarded over and over again," said Wutz-Lopes, who moved back to this area in 2004. "It was steamy."
One of the employees ended up leaving the company shortly afterward, she said.
Lawyers seem particularly prone to e-mail gaffes.
Three years ago, Jonas Blank, a summer associate at a prominent New York City law firm, intended to e-mail a friend about his low-stress workdays of sushi lunches and casual chitchat.
The expletive-laced e-mail mistakenly went to 40 people at Skadden Arps - and then to basically the entire world.
Blank soon apologized profusely in an e-mail and, later, got hired full time at the firm.
Earlier this year, an e-mail exchange between lawyers Dianna Abdala and William A. Korman was forwarded repeatedly across the Web.
By e-mail, Abdala turned down an employment offer. When Korman objected to Abdala's tone, she replied, "bla bla bla."
Why do intelligent people do stupid things on e-mail?
It's so easy to click "send" or to hit "reply to all" instead of "reply," e-mail users said.
Also, words on a screen carry a lack of tone, facial expression and vocal inflection. "I'm very mindful that things can sound obnoxious, even when you don't have that intent," said Alan Bedenko, a lawyer who runs a popular blog called Buffalo Pundit.
Now, the rise of blogs and social-networking sites offers new online minefields for people to gingerly step through.
"You don't want anything you write on the Internet to come back and haunt you," said Chris Smith, who rarely writes about his work or home lives on his Buffalo Geek blog. "It's a careful line we all walk if you want to be part of the blogosphere."
Locally, one blogger who is openly critical of his employer is Cliff Parks Jr., who produces the Pop Culture Is My Curse blog and works for Verizon.
"To call us "the company that couldn't [urinate] straight' is a profound understatement. How you people put up with us I will never know," Parks wrote in a candid March 27 posting. Parks declined to comment further.
Two months ago, former mayoral candidate Judith S. Einach said she briefly was barred from City Hall after she criticized Mayor Byron W. Brown on her Einach Report blog.
The day the move was reported in The Buffalo News, however, Brown called Einach to say she was welcome to return to City Hall for her volunteer work on a city cleanup effort.
Some employers bar workers from saying anything sharply negative or from revealing company secrets on their blogs.
Getting fired for criticizing your company in a blog is known as getting "dooced." It's a reference to blogger Heather B. Armstrong, who was fired in 2002 after slamming her then-employer on her blog, Dooce.com.
Kanoodle, an online-advertising company with offices in Getzville, encourages its employees to blog but does have a policy limiting what they can say about the company, said Tricia Marcus, Kanoodle's chief human resources officer.
"I think employers just have to realize that this is the way the world is today. You can't control [the Web]. You just have to protect yourself and be supportive," Marcus said.
Now, sites such as the vastly popular MySpace and the college-focused Facebook have given young people a new forum for their innermost thoughts and detailed accounts of their personal lives.
David Iwankow, 25-year-old member of the West Seneca School Board, had a lively profile on MySpace. That is, until earlier last week, when complaints from the community prompted his fellow board members to ask Iwankow to take the page down.
A few years ago, before August took her current position at Buffalo State, she was assisting an engineering major at another school with his job search.
The student had, quite properly, listed on his resume a Web site he had designed, so August decided to check out the site.
"When I pulled up the Web page, what I saw was him holding a beer [and] wearing a jester hat," August said. She recommended the student keep the Web address on the resume but drop that photo just to be safe.
Now, employers are entering the names of applicants into Google or other search engines and are starting to dig deeper into Facebook or MySpace for the candidates' profiles.
"We're certainly very aware of that possibility," said Jim Jones, director of the Canisius College career center. "And my feeling is, why take the chance?"
A couple of years ago, a student of Alex Halavais' set up a blog as a class assignment. In one entry, he blasted the customer service at a company.
Soon after, he went to interview for a job with another company. The interviewer told the student he liked him but the student would never get hired there unless he took down the critical blog entry.
The company with the bad service was one of its clients, the student learned. "I got this panicked e-mail saying, "Please kill this. Please delete it,' " said Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University who earlier taught at the University at Buffalo.
One recruiter said his company uses the Web to find good employment prospects and to get background information on job candidates, including to verify resume information.
"We use it as an informal screening mechanism," said Chris Beckage, regional sales manager with Superior Technical Resources, a staffing and outsourcing provider in Williamsville.
Facebook and MySpace users said it's a matter of common sense not to put anything on their sites that is potentially embarrassing or that reveals too much about their identity.
However, several users said it's not fair for companies to judge job applicants based on what they post on their Web pages.
"I think that's an invasion of privacy," said Jennifer Hobes, a Buffalo State junior who lives in Buffalo. "It's a social site. It doesn't have anything to do with how they'd do their job."
"I really do think what people do in their personal lives is their business," said added Rachel Griffo, who is earning a teaching certificate at Buffalo State and who uses MySpace.
e-mail: swatson@buffnews.com
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