Greetings,

Have you ever Googled someones name? Whether was for a job position or before going out on a date with someone? The information that you found was it helpful and or did it alter your opinion of the person after?

Sounds interesting!

I've googled old classmates and various people from my past just to see what they might be up to now. Some were pretty interesting.

Most of the time I wasn't even able to find the person via Google. Google was too worried about only showing quality websites and the ones with relevant info just didn't show up high enough. It seems to only work well when that person does some kind of website work or they are famous for something.

It is very helpful to know a stranger people.

never tried to anyone but I tried to myself. But its a good idea, I'll try it sometime.

I've Googled my name before I think that's something alot of people do. I've been in the hiring process with companies and I have Googled peoples name just for my own knowledge. I've had friends Google names of dates they are about to go on just to see if they have a MySpace, Facebook, YouTube account and etc.

When you want to know more someone I google the full name to see others comment on him/her. Even a company name, I google them before applying because there's lot of illegal company out there.

Originally Posted by Jenie0109

When you want to know more someone I google the full name to see others comment on him/her. Even a company name, I google them before applying because there's lot of illegal company out there.

Most definitely Google a company name before every doing business with them. Great point.

It's never good to judge anything from the surface, and the internet can only give you a surface view of someone you're "checking up" on. All the members of my family who are decent chaps with no sales methods, no unscrupulous approach to life, no creating illusions to please/exploit others... are totally nonexistent google-wise. Or close to totally nonexistent. The only one you can find loads about is the evil deceitful p.r. bloke who's always checking his own name to make sure nothing inconvenient shows up (but occasionally, very occasionally, making the stupid error of letting hormones guide the p.r. from time to time, then realising the folly and backtracking... meaning you have to wait 6 months or so for google's copies of your name, plus those on various scrapers, have been crapped out of the engine).

When i was trying for jobs ages ago luckily I had no google listings for myself but my interviewer told me that almost all employers in London will google you before employing you, they'll check your facebook and myspace too. (This is actually immoral and against the U.N. charter on human rights, I expect, but hey, they do quite a lot worse stuff, so don't expect this to stop).

Women and dates - I think that the fit ex-marketing babe I wanna get a date with will NOT have googled me. She's just not the sad type. Plus I believe she trusts me (and women are better than men, experience makes me believe, at not contradicting their own noble behaviour as and when that happens). Plus she has way too little time to spare. Nope - my date will happen based entirely on whether or not I'm charming when I bring the matter up with her... which is why I'm taking so long to do it - I want to be absolutely sure of what that entails.

The woman I wanna marry - if she googled me and found a lot of crap, she'd think to herself... still the same old 5h4m5

and let's face it - it's the guy I was who she actually fell for - so it can't hurt to not have changed enormously. the bad bits - I've changed: right wing, homophobe, racist, chauvinist... all gone. Just the nutty, hormone-loaded born-again oscar wilde is left.

A good salesman at a mercenary company would google the names of LOTS of company directors - read their speeches, quote their own views and words back to them, tell them how great their award for x or y or z was... and before you know it, they like you so much they WANT to hand over their filthy money to your company.

All novel research tools have a lifespan before saturation and p.r. make them redundant. Googling someone on google is redundant now - anyone on it with any depth of information has p.r.'d it themselves! You are reading what they want you to read.

I hire people as part of my job and since we hire staff in the UK and interview them over the phone I don't get a chance to meet them in person. So I always google the names looking for pictures, blogs, comments - anything that gives me a bigger picture. Most of the time people just seem normal - I don't care if someone has a piccie up of them drunk at some party or anything like that, for example. However, i did once decide against interviewing someone on the basis of weird comments they had made on the guardian website and because I found some classified ads they had put up which painted a pretty awful picture of themselves. Googling an email address is also pretty useful. Personally I think it would be idiotic of me not to make use of the resources that are out there- people can decide for themselves what they want to post on the net (I would never judge anyone based on a third party's opinion).

Originally Posted by luxl85

It is very helpful to know a stranger people.

And there is nothing stranger than people.

Originally Posted by The-Pixel

Greetings,

Have you ever Googled someones name? Whether was for a job position or before going out on a date with someone? The information that you found was it helpful and or did it alter your opinion of the person after?

Is this a kind of survey?

lol google ur own name in quotes sometimes proves to be interesting !

Woc

Originally Posted by usearchme

lol google ur own name in quotes sometimes proves to be interesting !

Woc

not if you've got a common as muck name like me

Originally Posted by iamspace

Is this a kind of survey?

Nope its not a survey its just something I thought about.

I think that "cyber-vetting" as it's known is completely immoral and probably illegal.

From the employer's perspective, what's the difference between checking a social networking site and getting feedback about an applicant from a very honest character reference? I don't know of anyone who would give the name of a personal reference who would spill the whole truth about when the applicant pushes the social envelope, so getting to the truth about someone might be a refreshing change. Social networking sites tell us a lot about a person that we'd never hear in a reference check.
From the employee's perspective, how does one's sense of humor or political preference affect his/her ability to perform the job for which s/he is applying? Besides, don't people have a right to private life in which they can vent frustrations?


I am aware of several highly-respected professionals who shine in their jobs that also have a pseudonym under which they blog their frustrations with the world. I imagine if people learned about such activity they might think differently about such people. But again, how does their private venting affect their on-the-job performance?


Since we've not seen much in terms of legal cases regarding this type of employee screening, we'll probably see the practice continue. Accordingly, it makes sense that if a person is concerned about a potential future employer having a problem with the applicant's personal life, it's not that difficult to create an alter-ego pseudonym to use on the social networking sites.

If you're doing it, bear in mind someone like the great activist whose name keeps getting suppressed (by himself) from many places on the web (because of all the vets!) will eventually make it impossible for you to get away with it!



Of course small businesses will not face any threat immediately, but consider the role activistic agencies play in trying to stop racism in employment... racist vetting goes on a LOT but it's illegal. Same for cybervetting. The quoted text summarises why it is a redundant practise.



I'm surprised, vicky, that you exclude people based on political opinions! That's not really legal even now. But in time any kind of cyber intrusion of a person you may be about to employ could lead to difficult court cases.

One of my friends, older, wiser than all people here, has spent a lot of time fighting employment cases, and now that i've started my activism hq (a bit more backbone and realworld strength than all them hippies like my potential wife and all her friends - google her, and you get a bleeding heart icon! she can get jobs, sure, but not for Arthur Andersen.. why? VETTING. She can only work for left wing people and other bleeding hearts. capitalists will google her and spot the hippy rainbowlover a mile off) and he has a good 30+ years of life left in him, expect trouble if you break ANY kind of employment ethic! It is so wrong to interfere with others' lives due to your own political views, or other views, that the lord created a whole human with more talent than anyone around, JUST to come and catch all such people and screw them over!



That's just my 5000 cents an hour!



Seriously. I personally never got vetted coz i ain't stupid enough to have applied for a job with a google-load of my name (i only got lax once i realised that i am the wrong colour to get a proper job in this country), but I still see it as second only to racism.



In the concentration camps the race-prisoners and political-prisoners were in the same boxes.



Bear it in mind, ye who google us private individuals on behalf of corporations... i mean you track the people, but who tracks you? As if the companies know ANYTHING about the wiring under the breadboard... and you know full well, overall, that if people like me can't stop the crimes via lawcourts and my mate, we'll stop it via server tools and the art of hack!



(that's just my 1000 cents an hour overtime)

Without MEANING to be confrontational (but i am being it)...
"not if you've got a common as muck name like me"
so you're saying that someone like me, with a VERY unique name, has not got the same right of freedom of speech as you, because it can prevent me getting a job, whereas you'll get away with it since your name slides into anonymity easily...

another reason why you should NEVER again vet anyone the way you say you do! You probably have already, due to the way karma works, robbed yourself of the best employee you could have had so far! Do it three times, and why bother working? You're not building for progress but for personal-taste. Business is NOT personal, if it was, hitler would have won the war, not lost it.

Having said all that, i've been waiting to figure out employees within my own business and now the time is really approaching, on several fronts my money is rising well, my business models consolidating.

And I've decided that my assistant will be the gorgeous fit lass i wanna go out with (in place of the woman i love, who has spent too much time in the last 10 years vetting me!) - so that's not apparently fair either, but when you consider the only reason i like her so much is because she and i totally have the same ethos in life, and she could easily learn from me all the stuff i do to "pilot my tardis" - you can see why she makes the ideal timelord assistant. then again, that IS about job performance. I know it's really hard for anyone to come to my side and work with me because you need a lot of amazing creative skills and also a basic faith in the power of imagination and things which some geek calls a "tardis"! I'm amazed i found someone who fits the bill and is fit! Still, i'll have to edge her slowly into it... but i'm sure she'll be keen to know. After all, it won't take much for her to actually SEE that i can pull her out of the ratrace and poverty. Not that she's the first one i'll pull out - as i said i'm making a business for my bro. He's never been vetted. Despite being a cambridge grad and former ceo of a development agency, in london he's just another darky, to your average employer. He was really naive when he claimed (for the 3rd time in his life) that a few years in a good company would allow him to progress, and make connections, and so on. Now he is desperate to quit and says if i get a business provably running in profit for him, he'll quit AT THE EARLIEST - because not a single darky person I know is in the ratrace that long before finding out they are the wrong colour to advance as high as the moron with half their iq, but the right kind of skin.

The danger of cybervetting is OBVIOUSLY that it simply adds to the many levels of prejudice alreadyh making britain and other "white" countries seem ridiculously immoral and hitlerian in many respects to quite literally the vast majority of non white people both inside and outside the west.

if it's any kind of motivation, vicky - it's people who do that who make me more and more reticent about being myself openly.

in the end... such societies just wipe themselves out. who brought about the death of the germanic white-supremacist ideal? jews or hitler? of course the body isn't quite turned to corpse yet - me and the jews still have a bit of work to do (as soon as i've fixed israel for them).

sorry to quadruple post but i feel very strongly about people using cyberspace for spying. i am a talented potential hacker and can spy on ANYONE and do anything to most people, if i try hard enough, but i have the decency not to. yet others, with far less ability than me, will insist on trying to use my turf against me and against those i protect (all INDIVIDUALS - that's who i protect)... i just like to make it clear that the tao may well say that those who (have to) make war (still) end up suffering because of the war they wage... but i don't care. for the ones i love (humanity, again, at an individual level) i am happy to suffer and be destroyed in the process of saving others.

...and here's a cautionary tale to women who do it to vet male stupidity from their love lives:

there's 2 women who i'd be happy to end up with, one who knew me for years and loved me, one who knew me for 3 weeks and we simply shared chemistry and tea. the one who loved me, works out here, researching, nosing into crap for people who fail to save anyone (in the name of humanitarianism) over and over and over again. She's probably seen me rant and rave at zionists, american troops, she's seen me because even without my name, when i go to those places i tell people everything about my past, so many of her friends of our common acquaintances have, over many years, even when IN college, seen and heard me and my big mouth.

now - i love her, i'd protect her forever, i'd give her more passion than 100 al pacinos could, and i inherit at least 5 mill dollars from my dad, and should end up making 100s of mill all of my own.

the other one, just wouldn't do that. she used to call me a gentleman, and i always know she's a lady. a lady does NOT spy on someone like that. she has no idea i'm writing this about her, whereas the other one can easily know what i write and what i do. and it influences her.

when both of them are 60, one of them might well be holding my arm. and living a wonderful life. i don't think it's the one who vets me, even though she loved me far more, so far.

i.e. whatever field of life you cheat in, you cheat yourself. if you want to make romance into bureaucracy, go ahead... but that is called "taking the love out of it", to me.

Just covering all bases. Being exhaustive. Sorry if it bored anyone. I know a lot of people find me boring, but it's the others I tend to be aiming at - the arrogance of these bored people sometimes amuses me - that they think i write all i do for THEM?!! Why don't they go and bore themselves instead - i doubt they have much personality with which to do anything else.

Anyway, i'll snap out of it. Maybe the harsh realities of why one woman i really care about has cut off the love of her life to spite herself, essentially, are hitting too hard. I've reached the point where out of the two of them I now am just accepting that the one i'm gonna date is the one i'm gonna end up loving. I'd only date her, out of all the women i know, because she's the only one (apart from the one i love) who just knocks me dead, in terms of the amazing feeling i get.

Anyway, it's a bit lengthy, but this topic is very precarious and lacking in a lot of concrete research and law online so far - but mark my words, it IS illegal to vet people like that for a job and if you do it for a relationship, you'll NEVER be loved, whoever you are. Trust is the biggest factor in love. Anyway, i should chill out. I know the gorgeous lass who trusts me will go out with me if i'm not clumsy about my approach, and i'm taking my own sweet time, so that i can say just the right things.

I hope my personal case makes it clear what the realities of this issue might be - the internet is practically my home, for 7 years i've been almost 100% inside this zone - if i had kept shut the whole time i wouldn't be human. sure i may WELL have lost one or two friends and people i love, just by being myself - but ain't done anything ill-advised or stupid. it was those who abandoned me who did THAT!