Just after my last post I read this article about the way digital traces from a young and sometimes foolish past can catch up to you. In the article I mentioned above from danah boyd a hypothetical case is written where somebody gets confronted during a job interview with the fact that she has protested against the WTO and Chinese policies (full case from the Harvard Business Review can be found here). In the guidance committee for Rathenau I talked about in the last post we also talked about a similar issue: what about all the pictures, video’s and other digital traces that show that we did some pretty silly things (well, I did… of course way past …).
Some of these things we would like not to be brought up during a job interview (or during a sales call, or …). Privacy seems to be terminally ill if she would not already have been deceased during my last post. Or is the context changing?
I think that the context is changing rapidly. Not just my silly actions from the past are online, yours are too, with the rest of the world. If people do not put the information online themselves, your ex-partner will (I will not post the link to this site due to bad taste, of the site that is :-)). It is a bit like in the movie “Crocodile Dundee”
Crocodile Dundee is explaining how they handle it when somebody has a problem in the Bush: If you have a problem, you tell Wally. Wally tells everyone … No problem.
When all our escapades are online than we will not be surprised to find all kinds of information that in the past we would have found not suitable. But now all is online. Just look in the digital mirror once in a while…
You put it on Internet, Internet tells everyone, No problem!