Personal identity vs. Professional reputation
It is important to protect your personal identity and to promote your professional reputation on the Internet.
I. Why should you protect your personal identity?
Your personal identity isn’t just made up of your first and last names. It also involves the following information:
- Mailing address
- Date of birth
- Personal telephone number
- Personal email address
- IDs / Passwords
- Social security numbers
- Maiden name
- Tax ID
- Driver’s license number
- Credit card number
-…
Thanks to search engines, aggregating data spread out over multiple sites is very easy. Some data is available on your public profile hosted on Plaxo, Myspace, Facebook or Linkedin,… Your date of birth or contact information can be found on social networks but also on services such as Skype for example.
Yet, the aggregation of this personal data is an open invitation to identity theft. A crime that is experiencing tremendous growth in Europe and which already affects millions of Americans and Canadians each year. Here’s what can be done in certain countries with information such as your name, your address and your date of birth:
- Open a bank account in your name in order to take out loans, write bad checks, request credit cards,…
- Buy vehicles, travel, …
- Have phone lines installed
- Create false IDs or passports
- Set up a fake marriage in your name
- …
Thanks to the information that’s available about your personal identity, it is also possible to try to guess your passwords or find the answers to the secret questions that are used to secure access to bank and administrative sites.
There is no need to hack your computer. Collecting the information that you or others have made public on different online services makes all of this possible.
Here are 2 very simple rules to protect your personal identity:
Rule number 1: Do not post your home address on public profiles. Someone could then use it to come and rifle through your trash or your mailbox so as to get the missing information they need to steal your identity. By contrast, you can go ahead and give your address during secure, private transactions, to set up delivery from an ecommerce site for example.
Rule number 2: Do not post your date of birth on the Internet. Some sites allow you to hide your date of birth on your public profile or enable you to specify who may have access to it. There’s always the risk, however, that databases or your ID/password will be hacked. Some services make the date-of-birth field a mandatory one so as to deny access to minors or to enable your friends to wish you a happy birthday. But in reality, the main reason for asking you your date of birth is to be able to send you targeted, age-specific ads. If you find that the date-of-birth field is indeed mandatory, simply fill in bogus information, such as January 1, 1910, just to make sure that your friends understand that that’s not really your birthday!!! In any case, your REAL friends already know your real date of birth 
Protecting your personal identity on the Internet is just online common sense!
II. The very vital promotion of your professional reputation
While you need to hide your date of birth and home address, it is important that your first and last names show up in the results pages generated by a search engine query. Having read the first part of this post and understandably daunted by the prospect of identity theft, you could be tempted by total anonymity, absolute invisibility:
- Lack of an online profile or biography detailing your skills or reflecting aspects of your career path
- Use of a pseudonym to participate in online forums, blogs or networks.
If this is your choice, then try to answer the following questions: How will a recruiter react when he can’t find any information about you? Your namesakes — sharing your first and last names — will occupy the space you’ve left vacant. What will be the consequences for you? How will your invisibility be interpreted by your social or professional circle?
In our online life, just as in real life, we have personal and professional spheres. Being anonymous may be useful in our personal activities. The ability to post anonymously allows us to freely express our views on sensitive topics: politics, religion,… Anonymity also allows us to hide our identity while using dating sites or simply preserve our private space.
However, unless you’re retired, have job security for life (e.g. civil servants,…) or are working in a job where your reputation is not at stake, it is essential to have an online professional reputation. The main gateway to your reputation is “Your first name + Your last name” being visible in the results pages of search engines.
Leaving a trail in a blog or a forum, that may hurt your reputation, wouldn’t be the worst thing which could befall you. The worst thing would be to have people be unable to find any traces of you, to not have an online reputation. 77% of US recruiters perform online searches about applicants. 7% of all queries entered on search engines are about a person’s name.
This lack of an online professional reputation could be interpreted as:
- A lack of transparency
- A refusal to share information
- A person with nothing to say
- Technophobia
- Risk aversion
Of course, it’s possible that a recruiter wouldn’t see it that way and that he would simply deem your online invisibility as neutral, unimportant, even insignificant factor. But how will he react if you’re the only invisible person in a pool of 10 applicants? What would you do in his place? This now becomes a question of risk management.
Your professional reputation on the Internet sends back an indirect brand image: the capacity and willingness to take risk, your personal initiative, the ability to share information, to put forth ideas or use the information technologies that are the core competencies of today’s organizations. The day is fast approaching when the choice between two candidates will come down to how easily their reputation can be evaluated, the losing party being the harder person to evaluate. Promoting your online professional reputation is thus useful in:
- looking for a job, making a name for yourself
- offering services (consultants, freelance,…)
- highlighting your expertise
- boosting your career
- building and promoting your brand image (Personal Branding)
Besides, you may have namesakes. Your Internet invisibility leaves the field to these namesakes. An anecdote may shed light on the problem. A consultant who had grown tired of having his clients ask him how long he had been making pottery, finally discovered on Google that a namesake was an expert … potter. Nothing serious and rather amusing as an example. But what if your namesake was also a consultant himself in your field. In this instance, you would run the very real risk that his reputation would become yours!
Just as in real life, our online life is made up of risks and opportunities! No more, no less. The Internet is a space in which one must adopt a specific code of conduct in order to avoid identity theft. It is also a place which enables professionals to emerge from anonymity and effectively differentiate themselves.
To dig deeper into the topic of identity theft, here are a couple of complementary reads in their order of relevance:
A government website (Ontario, Canada): What information identity thieves look for and how they get this information?
Identity theft (Wikipedia)
Identity Theft – A Primer (Canadian government source)
Identity Theft Resource Center: a nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to the understanding and prevention of identity theft.
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