True or False? Social Media misuse can ruin a Career

<p>MSG(P) Quick</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I believe that socia media these days is like talking to the news in the old days, you need to be mindful of what you say, since anyone can read it and it can be taken as the "official view of the Army"</p>

True! Social media misuse can ruin a career. Even in this forum, professionalism must be considered when posting. We can all joke a bit, but there are limits. If you&nbsp;wouldn't say it in on a stage in front of the entire unit, then don't say it here.

MSG(P) Quick,<div><br></div><div>I think I would take this a step further and suggest social media can ruin many aspects of civilian and military lives for everyone involved or even mentioned in a social media posting and whether or not the posting properly represents the context or the ground truth.</div><div><br></div><div>The other individuals and groups who appear in your profile, whose profile you appear in, your own behaviors and statements, their own behaviors and statements, may have a substantial effect on how you are perceived, regarded, assessed, evaluated, and in many instances may severely limit your own personal, social, cultural, economic, and employment opportunities.</div><div><br></div><div>Beyond these obvious explicit and often uncontrolled sources of information about you, there are an increasing number of dark technologies that have been developed to covertly collect and publish for sale even more deeply invasive data about you including comprehensive individually identifiable logs of your internet usage including: the search keys you enter, websites you intentionally visit, websites you unintentionally visit, and actions you perform on those websites that you may wish to believe are private but are actually up for sale.</div><div><br></div><div>Most of the purchasers of this far more deeply invasive data are interested in knowing as much about you as possible to deliver targeted advertisements. &nbsp;Other purchasers of this data are trying to improve website responsiveness by understanding browsing habits. &nbsp;But, in the end, so much data is collected on each and every mouse click that the entire web browsing experience is slowed.</div><div><br></div><div>One interesting product that can be used without charge for now displays a chart of tracking websites, and can turn off many of these sites, making your web browsing activity not only more private but also much faster.</div><div><br></div><div>For example, with one product recently disclosed on the evening news known as Disconnect, 89% of webpages initiated fewer requests, 86% of webpages used less bandwidth, and 80% of webpages loaded faster. [ http://www.<span style="font-size: 13px;">disconnect.me ]</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 13px;"><br></span></div><div>This browser application reveals that as I write this posting there are no less than 14 tracking websites collecting data about my website behavior. &nbsp;I have no reason to believe any or all of this data collection is attributable to RP but some may find potential application in optimizing RP website behavior.</div><div><br></div><div>As another example, you can suffer severe repercussions when you just let someone else use your computer. I almost fired one good colleague because truly outrageous, disgusting, repulsive fetish pornography kept popping up on his company desktop computer screen during meetings with potential business associates. &nbsp;He was immediately suspended and ordered off the grounds while we conducted internal investigation. &nbsp;As it turns out, by accident, I dropped by the office in the wee hours of one morning to find young naive male custodian using my colleagues computer to surf a wide variety of pornographic websites. I fired the custodian on the spot, we had to completely rebuild the computer, we lost a good colleague, and we ended up paying substantial civil settlement. In the end, this could have been avoided by logging out at the end of the day.</div><div><br></div><div>As yet another example, employers, credit card issuers, banks, mortgage, and insurance companies are using social media to identify potential adverse risk factors.</div><div><br></div><div>In short, what you do on social media is bad enough, but you can be harmed by what others associated with you do on social media, and even more to the point simply using social media can put your private web surfing habits up for public sale.</div><div><br></div><div>Warmest Regards, Sandy</div><div><br></div>

It's absolutely true.&nbsp; Unfortunately, some people will never learn that until it is too late and they've posted something that is detrimental to their unit, the Army,&nbsp;and themselves.

I wish everyone shared my own thought: mind your own business and if you don't like looking at it, don't look at it.