My supervisor busts into my office today and says, "I need to see you outside." (I share an office w/3 other people.) I'm immediately thinking, "Shit what did I do?!?" (I'm a lil' paranoid because at my previous job my supervisor used to take me in the hallway and berate me on a weekly basis, even though I didn't do anything 'wrong'.)

Anyway supervisor says, "I just wanted to let you know, that we had to let Jamie (not their real name), the intern go because they were blogging about the department."

Okay, so there is someone in my department who is mildly well-known, not a celebrity per se, but someone who is in the papers/on the news every now and again. So I'm thinking, 'duh, the intern should not have used this person's real first and last name in their blog.' (Even internally we do not refer to this person by their real name.) So I say something like, "Oh, that's understandable. We don't want there to be any security issues." And supervisor says, "Jamie was blogging about everyone and using their names."

Pretty much end of conversation...I go back to my desk. Ten minutes later a co-worker calls..."Did you hear what happened to Jamie? How do you think they found out?" Good question--at first I thought maybe there was a "red flag" that popped up if someone were to use the well-known employee's real name, but I don't think my company is that on top of things. I guess maybe they found out from Facebook? I'm not on Facebook, but I know several people in my department are, including supervisor and well-known employee.


So now I'm looking on myspace and googling this interns name + company name + well-known employee name trying to find this damn blog! Maybe I'll sign up for Facebook--I want to read what (if anything) they wrote about me!!!


What do you think about this? Evidently our interns were explicitly told NOT to blog. I'm not sure if this intern was blogging at work or what. It would be pretty stupid to do it at work, when you've only been interning for a few weeks. And it seems obvious that you shouldn't use people's first & last names, but maybe it was because of well-known employee they decided to use names. (But well-known employee isn't that exciting, imho.) Would it have been okay for them to blog after hours and not mention specific people's names? And if they weren't doing it at work how did my company find out?


I always feel like somebody's watching me...and I have no privacy....

DevotedPuppy said:

Absolutely, as long as the company's name, the employee names, and any other private information is not leaked in any way--ambiguously OR directly.

Myspace is blocked at my company but some others aren't but anything you do on the company computers are monitored to one degree or another.