This is troubling to me.

Certainly, I have no compunction about calling web postings public. Anyone who wants to view them most certainly can. What I have a problem with is the assumption that certain behaviors in the private sphere are necessarily related to those in the professional sphere.

When your private life becomes relevant to your ability to get or stay employed, I think a dangerous level of conformity has been required of you. I'm against drug testing for this reason, among others. The only reason I find the practice even marginally concionable is that drugs are, in fact, illegal. Getting completely drunk and passing out on a saturday night isn't. Your opinion of what such an act says about a person may or may not be valid, but if they can pass out on saturday and still come in on monday and do their job, then I think that's the end of the conversation.

It sort of moot however, since the tools and the will are both available. I certainly don't think it should be illegal for employers to search public forums. The fact is that despite all the power the internet has to expose the *real* you and connect you to other people, the *real* you won't always work in the business world. There's a reason most of us act differently at the workplace than at the club. The extension of that is going to have to be that we don't discuss such things in public arenas, or that we anonymize ourselves. Unfortunate? Probably. Necessary? Also, probably.

[edit] It turns out that I have a pretty minimal google footprint. You can find out that i was affiliated with a group called SNAP at Vanderbilt, that i made a few posts on the ALE mailing list and that there are a number of people that probably aren't me, but have the same name. I found no results past the first page.