Social media stuff ups have hit the headlines again this week, with reports of more staff being fired from U.S. companies for publishing stupid and compromising pictures of themselves on the web.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that some large firms are hiring local companies to monitor their online reputation, and have raised questions about the ethics of such activities, like investigating staff profiles.

Right or wrong, personal life or business, whatever you put up on the web is there for the world to see, the web is a permanent record, it is not anonymous! If you put something up in a public forum like facebook, myspace, tweet about it or post a video to flickr, its there for good. Search engines like google will cache webpages, so your information will be out there, long after any given webpage is taken down. For more on this, read Seth's article

This could be great for raising the standards of personal accountability - maybe if we know we're being watched all the time, we might act like it, and society's behaviour might get adjusted accordingly.

Then again, maybe we will just get used to lower standards...

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