Blog Topic
Employee Privacy
What Can Your Employer Learn About You From The Internet?
Posted by: Phil Gibbons
November 26, 2007
Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as blogs, allow individuals to share their interests, activities, and thoughts with the online world. But do you know who is viewing what you post on the Internet? It may surprise you to know that your employer and/or coworkers are part of that audience. Many employees in Indiana incorrectly assume that what they do in their personal lives is none of their employer's business and cannot impact their jobs. Guess what---Indiana law does not provide any right of privacy for what employees do on their own time. With few exceptions, employers can make employment decisions based on any information they learn about their employees. The Internet makes it that much easier for employers to investigate, research and confirm what their employees are doing during working and non-working hours.
Take for example Kevin Colvin, an intern with Anglo Irish Bank, who documents his social life through his Facebook page. Kevin notified his manager, via email, that he would be missing a day of work because he needed to return "home to New York" for a "family emergency." Perhaps suspicious, with a few clicks of a computer keyboard, Kevin's manager checked Kevin's Facebook page and learned that Kevin's "family emergency" was actually a Halloween party he attended in Massachusetts. Kevin received the following reply to his email (which was bcc'd to several other individuals in the office): "Thanks for letting us know--hope everything is ok in New York (cool wand)." Attached to this email was one of the pictures from Kevin's Facebook page, which featured Kevin dressed in a fairy costume with a beer in one hand and a wand in the other!
The moral of this story: If you are "out on the web," your employer may know much more about you than you realize. Be careful.
What do you think? Should employers be able to use information they learn about you from the Internet to make employment decisions?
