A curly question here: Let's reverse the situation. Mr X work for a company and he finds his boss has a facebook/bebo/myspace page. On that page are negative remarks about him.... Not mentioning him by name but it's obvious who the boss is referring to. Can Mr X sue the boss either under employment law or personally?

Jimbo #3 The problem is information published by an individual on a social network site, or any site for that matter, cannot be authenticated.

Would you really want your employers "secretly" thinking you were a Green Party activist simply because someone named "Jimbo" created a Facebook profile, which you have no knowledge of, and it says so?

People seem to have forgotten the web as a source of information has severe limitations and drawbacks. And considering fraud, especially personal identity fraud, on the web is rife, how anyone could consider it a reliable source of information is simply beyond rational thinking.

Once we have a means of knowing "without a shadow of a doubt" that someone on the web "really" is who they claim to be, then it might be reliably subjected to the exploitations of companies like SR7. Until then, its a flawed and dangerous concept with zero guarantee information collected on a subject is authentic.

And its a two-way street. Perhaps Jimbo has information about him on the web that implies he's a multi-millionaire with lots of spare change. How embarrassed might an employer be suddenly promoting Jimbo to an executive position thinking Jimbo might invest some of his riches in the business? LMHO

The potential for spreading misinformation has some very amusing possibilities. Perhaps once these information harvesters get a taste of a few, then people might start treating information discovered on the web as it deserves to be treated - like a grain of salt!

People need to take responsibility for what they say and where, and how, they say it. This isn't a new concept. I've worked with someone who was disciplined for having a loud conversation about work processes on a bus - not realising the manager's wife was sitting two seats behind her. Publishing statements on the net is no different: it's like shouting on the street. Anyone can hear you. Setting your profile to private is like shouting during a private party: you have some idea who most of the people who hear you are, but you still can't be sure there's not a gatecrasher. Libel and privacy law in NZ will probably uphold this once these cases get to our courts.

It's not responsible for companies not to keep an eye on what people say about them in public forums (newspapers, on TV, and on the web): avoids later claims of misrepresentation, etc. But is it going to far to discipline a staff member for saying they're having a bad day at the office - probably.

Pure and simple invasion of privacy! Next they'll be bugging my house listening to my discussions on the off chance I say something about the company I work for.

It's an interesting topic. Personally I have my page private, but I don't get too hung up on privacy of things like that, I'm of the mindset that if someone wants to find something out, they will, I do what I can (check the private box) but I don't waste time or worry over much more than that. I mean, I'm not going to start shredding my junk mail so someone can't look in my recylcing bin and see which model of Toaster I circled to potentially buy, or scribble out the 'must have crumpet function' I wrote at the top of the page, "hmmm he likes crumpets..."

The question I have is how is this different to parking outside someones house? If my boss hirers someone to spy on my public (if it was) facebook page and can use that as evidence, can I ask a mate to stand on the public footpath outside their house from 5 till 11 each night and note down what shows they watched and how many drinks they had? How is it different? My mate would get 'moved along' by the police pretty quick just like someone taking pictures of other people at the park. I guess it will become like most of the dodgy private investigators at some point, where ex cons, I mean ex cops, are 'certified' to trawl fb pages for info.

Then again, if something was found on my page and mentioned to me at work it'd probably be the inspiration I needed to get a few other things off my mind.

Hold on, when you sign up to a social networking site you have to agree to the terms and conditions of use, which warn you about having information publicly available. Both MySpace and Facebook have privacy features which enable users to block off unauthorised access. So if you're dumb enough to do stupid things and post them online publicly, expect your employers to be watching.

Companies do drug screens, background checks and police checks before hiring staff, because it's harder to dump staff after they've been hired. There are specific questions that HR and recruitment staff *cannot* ask, because they can be considered discriminatory - like how old are you, are you married, are you pregnant, etc.

Recruiters and HR staff trawl the net researching their candidates behaviour anyway, and often circumvent the discriminatory questions by gathering knowledge that's been made publicly available.

Why should this NOT be applied to existing employees, especially poorly-performing ones? You've offered the information up freely on the net, they haven't broken any laws or ethical considerations by viewing that information, what's the problem?

Anyone using their real information on any social networking site deserves scrutiny. The web is not a place to spill ones life story, nor should it be used by agencies attempt to gather data on people, because there is no guarantee those creating profiles, are who they say they are.

It's nonsense like this that will ultimately doom social networking sites, like facebook, to the scrapheap of history .. and good riddance.

Two issues exist here. Firstly, no company should have this kind of access to private data. Regardless of whether or not a person's profile is set on public or private, it is still a private space. The problem is that there is no restraint! When I go on holiday, I post photos for everyone to see, because I know some of my cousins don't have Facebook so I want them to be able to see my photos. I'm not so sure I will do that now, purely because I know that these photos will be deliberately looked over by some random with a personal interest in my activities.

Second problem is with the media. These companies are set up to trawl sites to essentially get there before the media does. What right does the media have to trawl through anyone's private site? Too often we see articles in the media saying something akin to "their facebook profile said that they were distressed this morning". Talk about shoddy journalism.

I'm more annoyed that the media considers it it's right to follow me around on the web, but acts morally offended when a company is set up to prevent the media from having this ability.