Reporter Piper Weiss – I love that name – penned an article in today’s New York Daily News titled What a tangled Web we weave: Being Googled can jeopardize your job search. I read the headline and thought that was a pretty obvious thing, but she raised a point I hadn’t thought of before.
Brief tangent – last year, some clown accused me of hacking into his computer after I posted information from a webserver log showing that he’d posted as two different people on a message board. If you know how server logs work, and he did not, you know that stuff like IP address, operating system and version, web browser and some other data are stored whenever you access a web site. I had access to the server log. The guy was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and when I caught him at it he accused me, on a public message board, of committing a felony to get the data. Which I had not done. That’s defamation of character, which I could have sued him for. (But I didn’t.)
So one thing not mentioned in Weiss’ article is defamation of character, and how that could harm one’s ability to get a job. I think that’s a very real risk. The thing she mentioned that never occurred to me, though, is that a potential employer might mistake me for someone else with the same name. It turns out two other men named “Robert Sterling” have higher Google moxie than me. One of them is the famous actor, who according to IMDB is still alive. The other is a semi-famous leftist conspiracy theorist, which is amusing, but he is not me, either.