How To Keep Your Online Presence Squeeky Clean

Tech Republic recently released an article called "Five tools to help keep your reputation clean" which I found to be a must read for anyone who spends a good portion of their time online whether on social networks, newsgroups, etc. The article was geared mostly towards keeping professionals with a "...product, service, talent, or skill..." reputation in good standings. I'd like to take it a step further and broaden the audience to any individual with an online presence because what you do online today could be the reason behind your termination from a company tomorrow. Not convinced? I invite you to take a few minutes to glance over this article: 

Fired Over Facebook: 13 Posts That Got People CANNED

What you should have gathered from the article is that companies are actively using people's activities on Facebook as reason to fire them and the reasons vary from immature pranks to complaining about customers to talking negatively about their place of employment. While the social networking giant is important, let's not be solely focused on it. Facebook just makes it easier to find information about people since it provides more centralized data on people. Name, birth date, hometown, pictures, etc., make it a dream come true for anyone researching an individual and being sure they have the right person.  

A simple Google search with some basic information about a person can also yield information if that person has an online presence. While preparing for this article I Googled an alias I used online and to my surprise (well not really) I found posts I made years ago in various online groups, websites I was once a member of and when I clicked on the 'images' option (on Google's page)...I saw my pictures. These were pictures I uploaded circa 1998 on sites I had long forgotten. So with Google and a little ingenuity a person can find your online profile. Now that you're scared to death let's figure out what can be done. 

Maybe a few years ago you did some things you aren't very proud of and have since grown from that experience and you want to get rid of any and all reminders of that event. One solution is to carefully read and use the suggested tools in Tech Republic's article to help you located and discard unwanted personal content you may have on the web. Here are a few of my own solutions:

• Privacy features are your friend- privacy features are put in place for a reason -- to be used. Keep prying eyes from seeing anything you don't want them to see with privacy features offered by many social networks.
• Use an online alias- if you feel the need to share pictures from the wild time you had with 12 strippers in Vegas, do it using an online alias, and not your real identity. Your company would never think to piece together the fact that John Doe and the notorious MrMagicStick are the same person.  
• Seek & destroy- find old accounts you had to services you may not use anymore and/or may have forgotten about and deactivate them. *Be smart about it too, don't create an alias and use the same email for your professional profile and your alias.
• Spring clean- any account associated with your real identity needs to have any sort of inappropriate content purged from it. Your personal online profile needs to be as clean as possible free of x-rated language, pictures and jokes, any drug related images or other inappropriate content, ie., racism, sexism, complaints about place of work, etc. 
• Migrate- all inappropriateness to your online alias and never bridge the gap between the alias and the personal profiles.

If all else should fail, do yourself a favor and use a bit of common sense; keep your personal and professional lives separate online.

@ITSecPr0