Question #115: Privacy Schmivacy

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Aren't you worried that a future employer will Google your name and refuse to hire you? You say fuck a whole bunch.
- HR On The DL

Dear HR On The DL,
  Job-hunting has become an electronic minefield, where a potential employer can too easily stumble over a picture of you doing unspeakable things with a bottle of cheap Vodka and a farm animal/fraternity pledge/Republican Senator. I've been lurking on the Internet since the days when the big innovation in text-only chat rooms was making the words turn different colors, and I've developed some reliable (so far) strategies for distancing myself from my incriminating past.*

1. Create an entirely fictitious online persona.
  If you craft a World Widentity (or three), and only interact with other web trolls while wearing your web mask, curious hiring managers will never know that you're the guy on the body mod blog with his cock stuffed through a hole in his left armpit. Just make sure that your new identity has a name that's different enough from your own that a search engine won't confuse the two. For instance, my real name is Wanklord Battlepants, while my Internet friends know me as Greg.

2. Don't ever have any fun in public. Ever.
  Does your idea of a good time involve nudity, intoxicating substances, farm animals or some combination thereof? Close the blinds, head down to the basement and go to town. If you don't leave the house, it's much easier to avoid being the subject of incriminating photos. If you find constant isolation too crazy-making, you'll have to be extra careful not to get involved in anything more scandalous than a lingering handshake.

3. Subterfuge = subterHUGE!
  If you're unwilling or unable to consider hermitage, a smart disinformation campaign can help you avoid awkward questions at your next interview. Getting a nickname, or even a fake name, and using it consistently will ensure that, should a third party post something scurrilous about you, the name being besmirched won't match the name on the résumé. Adding a prosthetic nose and fake beard to your party outfit makes deniability even more plausible, especially for the ladies.

4. Wait about 40 years.
  Whether we like it or not, the instant information technology of search engines and social networking is forcing a dramatic evolution of social standards of propriety and expectations of privacy. In another generation or two, the folks making hiring decisions will be sharing realtime 3-D scratch-n-sniff emotions (and nude pics) with wetwireless braincasting. They'll be sending text messages (and nude pics) from the womb. And they'll almost inevitably have much more realistic expectations about the range of human morality and sexuality, and how private behavior actually reflects on workplace ability.

5. If all else fails, go work in porn.
  Seriously, those guys don't care what or where you drink, who or what you like to please sexually in what public places, or what tattooed body parts you've got displayed on your blog. If you're morally flexible, there's a whole industry out there that's willing to become the next in your long line of unfortunate choices.

*All of this presupposes that you're smart enough not to post pictures or stories of your own drunken sexcapades. If you haven't made that connection yet, then no amount of listmaking on my part is going to save you from your own stupidity.