Marketing devotee Asks: How prominent Is Privacy To You?

Increasingly, employment recruiters are screening out job applicants after Googling them.

Information hunters are finding oodles of self-incriminating stuff on just about every college student they research. Many applicants openly discuss their predilections for boozing, doing drugs, involving in wild sex, and in scamming the authorities in discrete ways. Using their real names, these tell-all tattlers are screwing up their chances of getting hired at most firms.

It makes you wonder whether posting articles and publicity of discrete sorts will somehow bite the rest of us on the rear, sooner or later.

The other day, I posted a new article, adding to the hundreds already tracked by search engines, and instead of going with a jocular, self-critical biography, just to break the monotony, I thought better of it at the last minute.

"How long is the shelf-life of this biography?" I wondered. Then, I calculated that the half-life of nuclear waste is shorter, and I would be better off writing a straight-arrow article of myself.

Before the Internet, it was relatively easy to control the kind of facts a client or a hope had on you. If you put something into their hands, such as a trade reference, obviously, they could call it. And if your brochure spoke glowingly of your accomplishments, some of them were taken seriously.

But now, any person can dig up the dirt on you if they wish, whether by letting their fingers do the walking at search engines, or by paying industrial entities to do it for them.

It makes you wonder, if you're involved at all about controlling your image, if not your privacy, if you want to make that task any easier.

In fact, a major facility of Internet marketing has been the idea of development it Easy for citizen to find you, to learn about you. But the more facts they can access, the greater is the possibility that they'll unearth something disturbing, or at least off-putting.

With over 600 of my articles posted on the web, do you think you might find at least one that repulses you?

I warrant it!

But I cannot control When you'll gawk it. It might pop-up first, after I have sent you my packet of materials and you're undertaking the task of Googling me

Of course, if you verbalize you're a major player in your field, and a hope searches and finds zilch, that could be even more of a turn-off.

I just wonder how long it will take for social relations firms to start specializing in Removing web information, in the same way that they used to try keep the names of the rich and preeminent from appearing in "scandal sheets," a few decades ago.

Also, are there some smart college students out there that have made a decision that they don't want to appear in any search engine, that for all practical purposes, they wish to remain invisible?

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