Facebook and credit reports

People often say "be careful what you put up on Facebook, your future employer could see it." The conventional wisdom is that pictures with you and your friends drunk at a bar will surely come back to haunt you.

While it's true that the internet turns us all into minor public personalities, with corresponding PR concerns, I think these fears overreach in the wrong direction. When I first started my blog in 2001, it appeared to be a hopelessly self-centered, narcissitic sort of enterprise. But over the years my blog readership grew and people came to familiarize themselves with my style, and blogs in general became more common. I once left a job and then was rehired years later to find that literally dozens of high-level people in the firm had continued reading my blog all those years, and therefore were happy to recommend my rehire with a big raise.

Along a similar vein, I view public identities like Facebook and LinkedIn and blogs a bit like credit reports. I don't really want people to know that I was late on my phone bill two years ago, but because creditors can learn that, plus all other bits of information about me, they trust me enough to give me, a complete stranger, thousands of dollars, sight unseen. In essence, the existence of bad information out there, as long as it's considered comprehensive, *increases* trust in society. And trust greases the wheels of commerce like nothing else.

These days before I go on an interview or look at a company, the first thing I do is check out their profiles on Linkedin and do a basic google search. If I find nothing, I'm immediately suspicious. Who are these people that have no internet footprint?

And if I was hiring someone younger than me and didn't find embarassing photos of them drunk at a party somewhere, I'd conclude one of three things: 1) they're boring and have no friends, 2) they're abnormally secretive and perhaps have been covering their tracks or 3) they don't experiment with modern internet services. All three conclusions are bad.

Thus, in my opinion, we should err on the side of more self-disclosure, not less.