My buddy and fledgling pro-brewer Bill Bennett just shared this scary bit of business on Facebook. It’s a “social networking privacy experiment” called We Know What You’re Doing .com which collects unflattering public Facebook status updates and posts them to their site.
There are four categories on the site:
- Who wants to get fired? (people talking smack about their bosses)
- Who’s hungover? (people pain-bragging about their drinking prowess)
- Who’s taking drugs? (folks talking about their ride on the cannabis comet)
- Who’s got a new phone number? (people publicly posting their new digits)
Of the four categories, “Who wants to get fired” seems the most inflammatory – “I hate my boss Jay I hope he dies better yet I feel like killin him” (tsk, tsk, Anastasia R.!) – but the hangover category is by far the most robust. While there are four cannabis cowboys, eight boss bashers, and fifteen new digit divulgers, there are ninety-six people complaining about being hungover. Alcohol amateurs for the win!
What does this tell us? Well clearly alcohol is the most popular area for lack of judgement amongst people who lack the judgement to keep their Facebook profiles locked down. I imagine few of these geniuses have jobs to complain about, what with being rocked with a hangover on a Wednesday morning AND being dumb enough to post it to the entire world. There are only so many openings at Taco Bell.
I also think there would be many more “Who’s taking drugs?” hits if they would include keywords other than “cannabis” in the search for posts. Throw in “baked” and “stoned” and this would probably be a more robust category, but it might also be filled with references to beans, Alaskan and Middle Eastern justice.
As far as the folks who post their new phone numbers, I say whatever, just expect a mountain of junk texts once the spambots find your ass (think of The Terminator, but instead of trying to hunt and kill you, it’s trying to sell you penis pills).
Mostly what this site tells us is that you MUST keep your social-facing business in order. Never post anything that you don’t want your next employer to read (because they WILL Google your ass!), and if you do post stoopid stuff, lock it down! Even then you’re taking silly risks, but at least you’re trying to protect your own privacy.
Be smart, because you never know who’ll see that stalker girlfriend meme you just posted (including your stalker girlfriend – she won’t see the humor in it).
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Beer & Whiskey Brothers 
Alcohol really zonks the brain’s frontal lobe, home to executive functioning (planning, organization, impulse control, judgement – think of all of the stuff that a non-Lehman executive does for a corporation). Thus, beer goggles, drunk driving, etc – to quote Ahnold Schwarzenegger, “You should not drink and bake.”
Computers and smart phones should come with interlock devices. It was bad enough when you could call your ex- at an ungodly hour in a sloppy drunken state, but at least then, you’d be slurring your words and hard to understand.
Anything posted online is public and permanent. If I can see it on my screen then I can do a screen dump and email that file to anyone. Internet archives like “The Wayback Machine” preserve copies of Web pages even after they change.
Between Facebook users endlessly irritating me with their life altering updates, and those who have thrown enough money down to make Facebook one of the richest companies in the world, the message is clear. When it comes to technology, we are all guilty, metaphorically of being ‘Toonces the Driving Cat’.
Sure we look cool holding whatever device at arm’s length and typing some missive with an urgency reserved for finding a cure for cancer, when in fact you are taking time to ‘like’ your friend’s update that his dog was hit by a car. Remember when you would meet after work, have a beer and discuss these things? Maybe not.
Now it’s an electronic Tower of Babel with users obsessing over the latest OS and insisting that these devices make their lives more efficient, while the nation maintains 10 percent unemployment. This is the very oblivious detachment that had homes selling for eight or more times the average annual wage of a buyer, when most were employed, while thinking they were driving the gravy train to new heights. Instead it took a dirt road leading to a cliff with the wheels falling off the thing.
Bring it on ‘Mr. We’re Watchin You Unemployed Hungover Posting It On The Interwebs’ guy, because there’s more to worry about than my drinking habits, opinion of my boss or my new phone number that I got as an Herbalife dealer. I got nothing but time to talk and I’m my own boss now so put me on speed dial cuz it’s your nickel.
This is just one more indicator that this just ain’t my world anymore.