Hello and Welcome.
An interesting scenario occurred in the office today. A fellow staff member in our Hong Kong office found themselves blogging about recent design events in his city. Being a keen writer and social commentator, it appeared he had quite harmlessly embarked on a blogging experience. Until …a google search engine sent a notification to a marketing coordinator in Australia advising that there had been a new addition to the internet - that contained the company name. The marketing coordinator was quite impressed with the content and sent the link to a global email base. The blog in itself was quite harmless, it was a logical and indepth discussion about factors that influenced the current state of architectural design. Yet, human nature being as it is, it would go without saying that interested readers would like to know what other such entries existed. Myself being one of them.
Not 2 minutes into exploring his blog, I was presented with (what would be to some, confronting) commentary on his sexuality and sexual experiences. This was not just any old architectural design blog!I spoke to the Marketing Coordinator and of course, she had not realised that there had been any other entries that might be subsequently damaging. Her initial response was defensive “Everyone knows he is gay – its no secret”. Ah yes, but Im sure he would have like to have kept the secret about his fantasies of sleeping with a straight man, or being involved in a straight ‘group’ scenario that might have also included a women. She recalled the email when the staff member in question asked her to do so, but had the damage (if any) already been done?
Which brings me to my question; who is at fault? Should she have queried with the staff member whether she could link to his personal blog, a large proportion of the company? Or was he already giving license for her to do so, by already having the content publicly available for viewing by anyone who cared to search? How public truly is the internet? Or are we assigning too much trust in its vastness that anything we display online is buried deep within?
Many months ago I encountered a similar scenario – twice actually, as it appeared I did not learn my lesson the first time! During the house-hunting and flatmate-finding process, I was frequently able to ‘look up’ potential candidates on the internet. And ohhh you would be surprised how many people do not set their facebook profile to ‘private’. It was interesting to get a background on any potential axe-weilding strippers cum school teachers who refused to do the dishes. One such fellow I looked up, had a blog. An intelligent (if not left of centre) character, he seemed to take joy in conducting indepth analysis’ of society’s ills. In passing comment, I mentioned that I had discovered his blog, and his immediate response was to Google MY name. Oh my.Now, the result that topped the list is not something that I am ashamed of. It was fun at the time and every gal likes their 15 minutes of fame, but it is certainly not a true representation of my character. Especially in the way that mens magazines like to twist their models’ words to make for interesting reading. The potential housemate thought it highly amusing though. And subsequently I now live with him.
Hey… maybe it even helped a little?? *wink*
I relayed this story to colleagues the following week at work, keeping the conversation as broad as possible. Obviously not broad enough – as giggles from behind computer monitors enlightened me to the fact that they knew the story I was telling, was in fact about me. As I type today, the entire consulting team has seen me in my underwear.
True story.
So I do know what it feels like to have your personal life discovered on the internet. Obviously not as interesting as today’s discovery though. But this poor fellow in Hong Kong, what standing does he have? He engaged with an invisible and infinite audience, telling any i-surfer about his personal experiences. But when this is shared in a corporate environment, it can go from an open honest dialogue about a regular guy, to a career debilitating weapon. I trust that in future he will be selective with his words when discussing work, or even with the content itself. Or heck, did he just have it coming, did he ‘play dice with the devil’? As a reader though, and a colleague, don’t we have some sort of moral obligation to protect the trust that he has in the vast, deep dark webspace, and maybe just double-check with him first?
