How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time

The New York Times
December 30, 2007

By RANDALL STROSS
WERE Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.

Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only “for cause.” The rest of us are “at will” employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.

A line needs to be drawn — Day-Glo bright — that demarcates the boundary between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after hours, as long as no laws are broken, is none of the company’s business. Of course, what we used to call “off hours” are fewer now, and employees may connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible.

In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.

Millersville University, in a motion asking the court to dismiss the case, contends that Ms. Snyder’s student teaching had been unsatisfactory for many reasons. But it affirms that she was dismissed and barred from re-entering the school shortly after the high school staff discovered her MySpace photograph. The university backed the school authorities’ contentions that her posting was “unprofessional” and might “promote under-age drinking.” It also cited a passage in the teacher’s handbook that said staff members are “to be well-groomed and appropriately dressed.”

MR. LENARD said last week that protections for employees for off-duty behavior varied widely from state to state. Colorado and Minnesota have laws explicitly protecting all employees from discrimination for engaging in any lawful activity off premises during nonworking hours. In other states, like Pennsylvania, where Ms. Snyder lives, such protection doesn’t exist.

What some employers regard as imprudent disclosure online may seem commonplace to the rest of us. On Dec. 16, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of a study, “Digital Footprints,” showing that 60 percent of Internet users surveyed are not worried about how much information is available about them online.

The findings reflect a significant change within just a few years in public attitudes about privacy and disclosure. In an earlier Pew study, “Trust and Privacy Online,” published in 2000, some 84 percent of respondents expressed concern about “businesses and people you don’t know getting personal information about you and your family.”

Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project and an author of both the 2000 and 2007 surveys, told me that she was surprised by the reduced concern about online publication of personal information. Internet users are not just passively allowing personal information to slip from their control and end up online, where it is searchable; they are also actively putting the information online themselves. The “Digital Footprints” study coined a new phrase, “active digital footprint,” to refer to the personal information that individuals increasingly place online voluntarily.

Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew study included an unexpected finding: Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

Tight privacy settings won’t always keep personal information placed on social networking sites safe from an employers’ prying eyes. A manager could literally look over your shoulder or afterward check a history of sites you visited.

Ms. Snyder had not adjusted her MySpace privacy settings to restrict public access, but why should she have done so? She anticipated that her profile page would be seen by school authorities. On it she declared that as an adult, over the age of 21, she believed that “I have nothing to hide.”

The day may come when nothing that is said online will be treated as embarrassing because we will have become accustomed to everyone disclosing everything. The Pew study phrases this possibility as a question: “Will we come to be more forgiving of embarrassing or unflattering information trails as more of us have our own experiences with personal data leftovers gone bad?”

In the interim, some people will be more cautious than Ms. Snyder. Ms. Fox of the Pew project recently paid a visit to New Orleans for a bachelorette party with female friends — husbands not included. She wanted to make sure that details of the festivities did not find their way to the Internet. She instructed her friends: “If you’re going to upload the pictures, don’t tag with real names.” The photos went up, without traceable digital fingerprints.