Not posted publically on Tumblr for obvious reasons

[petronia]

I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?

PSA via Gizmodo. The devil is in the details! For one, most of my incriminating links have fallen off the 7-year statute of limitations cliff; for two, no one even knows Livejournal exists anymore, and my Facebook is so squeaky clean I leave it public just to be hilarious. It also pays to do obfuscatory footprint-widening stuff like storyboarding an indie video game, winning a business case competition, or writing the occasional gig report for a popular music blog. The downside is that you can theoretically fail on text pr0n, so one has to run a regular hygenic search for ppl who're daft enough to rec NC17 fics under the author's real name, then leave their LJs googleable.

Comments

[z107m.livejournal.com]

dude, sorry to hear. you have my sympathies. i'm pretty paranoid about these kinds of things coming up when i start teaching. what kind of recourse is there? aren't there certain programs or ppl who help you wipe your internet footprints?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

There might be? I mean, none of these things ever dig all that deep - Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Flickr, maybe Tumblr or Quora or stuff like that. But LJ/DW aren't on the map, and if you separate your pro email and personal email and don't have stuff linking to each other... Teaching and politics are one thing (for which you have my sympathies XD;) but I work in Web, so it's more like I have to make my pro presence "loud" enough to drown out the rest - and I have the luxury of holding as a matter of principle that any employer who would rate me on the contents of a private blog that I've separated from my pro identity is too benighted to work for anyway.

[naanima.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating.

Presently my professional career is community services/development, which doesn't relate back to my online life in any way, shape or form. I have four email accounts (not counting my work email), two of which are for fandom purposes, and one is purely for facebook purposes (RL. which is pretty boring).

I have been using 'naanima' since 2003 and before that I was - um, I think 'Lilack', and since last year I have begun to branch out with my dw account under another pseudonym, which is not linked up with any of my 'naanima' related social-media accounts for reasons I don't actually know myself.

I don't think anything on my lj and other fandom-related social media accounts would get me fired (this might be due to the fact I have kept my RL and online life very separate), but then again I'm mostly online for the purpose of fandom-related content.

Also, I think I have known you (online) since 2000 (?).

ETA: That is to say, your profession seem to lend itself for the need to have an online presence and big foot prints, but it is a very interesting point that controlling other people's actions in regards to your online and RL persona to be very hard.

ETA 2: I'm also rather careful with never using my real name in relation to fandom related topics. My name is way too different for most western countries.

[tochira.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing this! I've done the separate e-mail address thing for ages and (more importantly) my name/initials are so common that everywhere I've ever lived, I've had to constantly reaffirm that I am not in fact 5 other people (doctor's office, DMV, you name it). I pity the poor schmuck who has to run a search of my name with my middle initial; not even I could find the real me, although I did find several of my local doppelgangers. XD