I don’t mean being Pitted for something you’ve posted. We’ve warned members in the midst of a divorce or custody battle to be careful what they post here, for fear the opposing attorney will use it against them.
Has this ever happened to anyone? I would imagine you would have to admit that you post on message boards, but is this something opposing counsel is likely to ask in the course of a deposition? Have any of our lawyer Dopers used message board postings, LJs, or blogs to help their clients?
It’s not that farfetched. Companies have fired employees for posting to personal blogs, and I can’t think it’d be too hard to get a person’s posts for any other use. I think the challenge would be in linking the person to the posts, though.
This is my basic reaction. I believe a person would have to want to be caught to use:
Real name
Specific address
Specific place of business
Names of real life people in a slanderous way
Specific dates
Anything that could be deduced from a collection of postings would be the next level of carelessness. Assuming others wouldn’t bother to gather such a collection and start piecing the details together is just asking for someone to do just that.
It’s a hard thing to control, I think. You may want to reveal enough data about yourself or your job or your friends, relatives, etc., so that others don’t get the feeling you’re just making stuff up. But having a Pollyanna attitude toward the innocence and anonymity of the Internet is not wise. In some cases it can get scary.
I actually asked to have the attribution for my SDSAB report changed to my real name. I wanted to be able to use it in my professional portfolio and didn’t want a curious employer browsing the boards looking for my posts.
It happened to me a few years ago. A hell of a lot of high school drama could have been avoided if I had been more careful about what I posted online. No legal action, although it was threatened, but oh, it was so not fun.
Could you share details? I assume as long as you keep your online life and your real life separate, and don’t let too many people know your user name or where you post, it might be a bit difficult to tie the two together.
I used to be a moderator on a large, busy messageboard. More than once, the site’s administrators received requests from attorneys for IP information that would be of use in identifying people who had made certain posts. The board’s owner routinely refused to provide such information unless a subpoena was issued.
Heh. The Rhinoceros Times is (or at least used to be) a humor publication. Bully on them for doing investigative reporting!
The closest I’ve come to having it come back to bite me was recently when the president of my nonprofit asked me, “So are you Lord of Dork?” I feigned ignorance for a moment while I panicked, and then said, “You mean Left Hand of Dorkness?” She said that that was what she meant.
Turned out I’d recently linked to her website from the SDMB, (she’s a reverend, and was the officiant at our wedding, and while she’s more New Agey than me, she’s a wonderful person), and her webmaster, astonished at the sudden spike in website visits she was getting, did some researching, through which she discovered my post here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything unflattering about her in the post (I may have mentioned her newageyness), but it was still pretty startling to have that happen, and has made me more careful about what I post.
I am a member of a professional association with dues of $160/ year, often but not always paid by the employer. There is a message board for members which is fairly active. One woman posted so often, and with so much drama and detail, that she was “stalked” by someone who emailed her posts to her employer and she was fired for posting confidential information.
Another member who likes to use the board as a forum (some might say soapbox)for his professional political views claims to have been told in job interviews that he wouldn’t be selected because of his behavior on this message board. Others in the profession have appreciated his contributions, though, and he is gainfully employed in an executive position.
We were once considering hiring a software developer who had on his resume that he had written ‘several books’ on software design. So I googled his name, found the books that he had ‘written’. He had co-writing credits on two of them, and writing credits on one. The one that he had writing credits for had absolutely scathing comments by a number of people basically saying that the book was complete junk, misleading, simplistic, etc. Possibly the worst reviews I’ve seen for a technical book.
He did not get the job. He should not put his books on his resume. The Internet is not his friend.
I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to assume that some companies will as part of the HR review of your application google your name and see if anything egregious shows up.
It doesn’t have to even be anything awful you did. It could simply be a list of your hobbies, or the fact that you appear to have posted during working hours, or any number of things. For example, anyone who googles my real name will quickly discover that I am a poker player and have written articles on the subject. If I apply somewhere where the boss is an anti-gambling zealot, that could sink my application. On the other hand, I put that stuff on my resume, so I don’t really care.
I suspect this stuff will become a legal issue some time in the future. At some point, someone will get rejected for a job because of something they said/did online, and they’ll make a privacy issue out of it and there will be lawsuits and we’ll start having to look at the legality of employers digging into your personal life like that.
Oh, and how often do people who date others google them to see what they can find out about them online? Wouldn’t it suck if your new girlfriend discovered a whole bunch of messages you left discussing your past relationships, sexual likes/dislikes, etc? Even if those messages are totally innocent, there are just some things you don’t want your new SO to know about you, or you’d at least like to choose the time and place for the discussion.
Heh. My sister started dating a new guy and since she’s been burned in the past, I checked him out online. To discover that he was married. :eek: Not the first time that a guy had lied to her about his marital status. So I broke the news to her gently. She paused, said, “yes, I know. His divorce will be final next month.”
She told him that I’d searched, and the next time I saw him, he pulled me aside to assure me he was on the up-and-up, and offered to show me the divorce papers or let me talk to his lawyer. I told him if he hurt my sister he would fry like an egg on a hot July pavement. They’ve been married a couple years now, and he’s a really good guy.
As to the privacy issues, all of this is public record – articles, message boards, etc. You just have to be aware of that when you post.
First of all, yes, if asked, you would indeed have to admit that you post. If you are a party to a lawsuit, I likely would not ask you in a deposition (unless I had the goods on you already, then I would confront you with it there). Instead, I would be more likely to ask you in interrogatories (formal, written questions you can ask of a party to a lawsuit) whether you had a diary, or posted to the internet about the dispute. If you had, I’d look at those posts to see if they’re helpful to my case.
There have been a couple of infamous cases centered around message boards. Those cases have generally involved defamation claims – i.e., some purportedly disgruntled employee or former employee posts claims that “Acme Corp. sucks and here are all the bad things they do!!” Acme, of course, wants the alleged defamation to stop, so they issue a subpoena to the ISP to get the real name of the poster. The ISP tells Acme to bugger off, so Acme hauls the ISP before the judge, who may or may not enforce the subpoena (depending on the issues in the case, good cause, etc.). But one way or the other, Acme is likely to get the information, and then Acme can go after the poster directly.
Would I use MB postings, LJ posting, etc., to help a client? In a heartbeat. It’s all public information – you have no privacy interest in what you’ve put out there and you’re certainly not trying to keep it confidential. But the information has to be relevant and admissible.
I was living happily out in the intermountain west when I discovered that the newspaper in my old small town in Kentucky had a message board. I was pretty bitter about the place (dry counties, crappy schools, hypocrites, etc…) and posted some of my feelings on that board.
As it turned out, I moved back to near that small town.
One of the guys who worked for the newspaper apparently recognized me from my postings. He has been very cool to me ever since, and I expect that my postings are why.
Back in the late '90s, various actors began posting stories all over UFO-related Internet message boards concerning an engineer and physicist who ran a small computer manufacturing business in New Jersey. The person in question had supposedly come into the possession of lab notes from a former employee of Bell Labs, stating, amongst other things, that the first transistor had been reverse-engineered from components of an alien spaceship that had crashed at Roswell, NM in 1947. This caused something of a tizzy in the always-willing-to-believe UFO community, with various Internet entities (later found to be socks of of the engineer himself) expanding on the stories and spinning ever-more complex and bizarre tales of vast government conspiracies covering up the fact that many modern inventions ha=d been sourced from alien technology.
Eventually, though the efforts of several people tracing the message origins, it became apparent that the owner of the computer company was in fact impersonating most if not all of the various people posting material related to this story, and that the whole thing was some sort of bizarre marketing ploy to direct traffic to his company web site. I had a small role in the dismantling of this story, and a particularly critical message I had posted to a now-defunct UFO web site came back to bite me in the ass.
I had foolishly posted the message from my work E-mail account, and a few days later a person representing themselves as the head of security for the New Jersey computer company (but who was probably the person mentioned above) called my place of employment to make what he said was a courtesy call to inform them that one of their employees was posting slanderous accusations from a company account. He had of course traced the message by the orginating IP address. I’m pleased to say that my company treated the caller as a crank, but it certainly drove home the notion that one must be extremely careful what one posts from a company network.