Digital Privacy - a new generation should take note

Fantastic PR coverage today for Viadeo who quite rightly highlight the fact that employers are increasingly googling candidates and checking out their social media sites for background, and rejecting them if they don't like what they see.

Back in my day, it was staff at Boots would call the police if they saw anything slightly untoward in the snaps they were developing - now friends who tag people doing those same untoward things on sites like Facebook are inviting trouble, and if the PR-generated story (even featuring a PR agency case study) is to be believed, even preventing job offers.

Just as well these sites weren't around when David Cameron was going through his "phase", or his punishment may have been a bit more severe.

What we're going to see is a a radical re-interpretation of privacy in future. With more young people growing up treating social media and blogs as diaries, and using them to send very public messages and photos to friends/enemies/lovers for everyone to see, the backlash and trouble is inevitable, in both personal and professional lives.

None of the blogs I've seen on it have so far dealt with the digital privacy issue as well as the New York Times Magazine from earlier this year. Worth a look at.