Great post

I haven’t been drunk in years though, and am rarely out past 9pm.

Looking at my online content, one might think I was a right old boozer I suppose. It’s all BS though, and if you don’t want to employ me because of my personal interests, then i don’t want to work for such a narrow minded idiot anyway!

I would look like the model employee.

Whether or not that it true about me, is known only to me, but that’s what they would see, and I would start Monday :)

Does it matter? No. The particular service is less important than the instinct of the person using it. If you are unwise enough to check in at establishments which will reflect badly on you, you’re also unwise enough to post photos of it to another service and to brag about it on a third.

I’m not sure thats even a bad thing. Reference checking is the best way for an employer to gauge the caliber of the person they are hiring, but reference checking has become less effective as our world has become larger and more mobile. The public Internet serves as a reference of sorts, albeit not a human one.

The cases which do bother me are when an employer or public agency demands prospective employees to friend them or change the privacy settings of accounts to allow arbitrary snooping. People have a right to privacy. My own rule is not to post things online which I don’t want everyone to see (my Facebook account is all pictures of my kids), but that doesn’t mean I willingly give up my privacy. Nobody should.

That said, I agree with Ben’s comment that privacy controls are going to be increasingly important for all social services, not just location based services, as we continue to put more and more of our lives online. Data like what we share with Gowalla and Foursquare can reveal a lot about someone, so it’s important for each user to be able to decide just how open they want to be with that data, since everyone will have different privacy needs, wheter it’s just for a sense of personal privacy, or for work related privacy like that discussed in this article.

(if you friend the recruiter/interviewer then that’s your own fault).

Right now sites like FourSquare and Gowalla have varying degrees of privacy – and this will change over time too. For me it’s kinda obvious that to achieve mainstream these sites need to cater to privacy issues beyond any other social network before – and they will get that right.

What is much more interesting is looking at people’s twitpic/etc uploads + many now have GPS embedded in the EXIF info.