Spying goes corporate

[B]y being precisely right in your appearance, you signal that you'll conform in any other way they might want. You're sending a signal about your degree of compliance.

- Barbara Ehrenreich as interviewed in Alternet

evidently, "appearance" now extends to every aspect of an individual's life...

Tien Nguyen, a college senior, signed up for job interviews but said he was seldom contacted until he withdrew a satirical online essay.

[...]

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

[...]

"The term they've used over and over is red flags," [Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University] said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

after spending many years in the corporatocracy, i can say with a fair degree of certainty that the "core values" are conformity and compliance...

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