When the CEO of Google speaks a lot of people listen. It may come a bit of a shock though, to hear him suggest that people may need to change their names because of their previous interactions on social media. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Schmidt warns that people have now put so much information about themselves on the web that it may have serious consequences for their future. It may get so bad that people will need to change their name upon reaching graduation. This will be needed to avoid our social media history coming back to bite us.
The teenage years are a time when many individuals rebel and say all types of strange things – these days we automatically publish even our wildest notions directly into our social media feeds. It will soon be possible for bosses to access all this information and something we said on a gloomy Wednesday when we were thirteen could prevent us from getting a job in our twenties. It really is scary and even things that we said as a joke could completely ruin us – many bosses have no sense of humour.
The idea of a whole generation of children needing to change their name might sound a bit extreme but there could be a lot of truth in this. It is not only the young that need to worry, because adults are just as capable of publishing inadvisable information about themselves on the web. Who hasn’t had a flaming match on a web forum? We lose control and forget that anyone could be reading these comments. This is why it is vital that we always consider everything we publish to the web as being things that anyone will be able to see and judge us on.
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