Nov 14, 2007 11:30 am US/Eastern
Facebook Gets Guy Dressed As Fairy Bagged By Boss
WORCESTER, Mass. (CBS) ―
Many people are learning the hard way that there are no secrets on the Internet.
More and more employers and school officials are using the Internet to do research on their employees and students.
One example is already getting forwarded by e-mail around the world and was written about in the Washington Post, reports CBS station WBZ-TV in Boston.
It's a cautionary tale about a young man named, Kevin Colvin, an intern at the Anglo Irish Bank of North America.
On Halloween, Colvin e-mailed his boss saying something "had come up at home in New York" and that he "needed to miss work the next day."
The next day his boss decided to check Colvin's Facebook page and discovered pictures of the man dressed as a fairy and holding a beer at a Halloween party in Worcester, Mass., the night before.
Rather than reprimanding him, the boss sent Colvin this e-mail: "Thanks for letting us know - hope everything is ok in New York (cool wand)" with the fairy picture from Colvin's Facebook site attached.
If that wasn't bad enough he sent blind carbon copies of the e-mail to the rest of the company.
The Anglo Irish Bank of America has offices in three U.S. cities: Boston, New York and Chicago.
This lesson in humility is just the latest example of Internet use gone wrong.
There's also reportedly an e-mail going around called "30 reasons girls should call it a night." It includes pictures pulled from Facebook pages of young drunk women doing all sorts of things.
So the moral of this story: Be careful what you post on social networking sites like myspace.com and facebook.com.
According to that Washington Post article, more and more bosses and school administrators now know how to search these sites and find these incriminating photos.
According to the Post, 82 percent of employers said negative information found in an online profile would influence their decision on whether to hire an applicant.
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