Confidentiality Agreements & Self-Promotion
Hi all,
I'm curious as to what users of the forum do to increase/promote their online brand and how do you avoid trouble with current/past companies regarding confidentiality and work-product?
I have a very small foot-print online currently consisting mostly of a few cross-references or common aliases/account names to my facebook, my linkedin and my domain (which is used for a number of things behind the scenes but publicly appears as email only).
There is of course public record information out there when you search for various pieces of my PII and some old bits of information out there that can be found when you google some of my information but for the most part, I've kept my overall online presence to a minimum while keeping seperate and segregated accounts for security/privacy reasons both from penetration of various sites by hackers and/or the ability to follow the small, seemingly unrelated and inocuous PII digital breadcrumbs we all inevitably seem to leave behind back to their source and through that, the discovery of other pieces of PII.
In addition to my security concerns, I've also have never understood the appeal of Twitter and the like, I doubt I ever will and I dont see myself using the service any time soon, if ever. Sorry but my life and your life are just not that interesting, the news is available elsewhere and I dont really care what celebrities do with their day... Ill give you a hint, it's often not all that different from ours; they wake up; they get ready; they eat; they go to work; they work; they come home; they relax and they do it all again tomorrow, for the most part, just like the rest of us.
That being said, I have been considering trying improve my online "brand" and ways I might go about doing it. I was giving some thought to sanitizing and documenting out (style to be determined but current considerations are a private forum, a blog, wiki or custom webpage) some of the more interesting issues I've come across over time, including fixes, bits of code, scripts, one-liners and other configurations I've done in the past.
Like most people, I generally keep a running record of information and issues I work on so I can refer back to it later if needed. For a long time, I kept this information in a private me-only server but the private server did not make it back online following my last move so when my co-worker and I were discussing an issue I knew I had run into previously, I had to refer to hardcopy.
As I was going through the papers, I kept thinking how I really needed a better organizational method and how even my old private-only site as lwimited as there were no tags or other easy ways to sort/search through the data. Since I didnt want to spend all day going through papers, I also took to searching google but I wasn't all that hopeful... It was one of those esoteric problems where limited documentation was to be found when I originally had the problem and fewer people still had documented their solutions to the problem online... So imagine my surprise when the first site to pop up had the exact answer I needed.... Imagine my further shock to learn that the author is (loosely) a fomer co-worker (we worked in the same department but different divisions, different shifts, days, customers, etc) and that the sanitized documentation was extremely close to my original documentation.
I dont want to get into a debate on the page itself or its contents. Its possible they found the solution on their own and Im going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that despite the esoteric nature of the issue. Ultimately, its not important
What is important is how he was able to post this information. At every employer I've worked with, I have signed a some form of confidentiality agreement, some form of agreement regarding the company's ownership and/or right to retain work-product, intellectual property and patents and though I have always declined signing non-competes, I have been presented with a fair number of them.
Such confidentiality/work-product agreements are pretty common and as a result, I have always avoided releasing even sanitized versions publicly for security reasons and to avoid any accusations of impropriety or theft of company property/work-product and yet there also seems to be no end to blogs and posts out there that follow a similar theme/topic demonstrating how-to's, code snippets, full scripts and other problem resolutions that often were resolved while under the employ of a third party.
In the past, I have avoided releasing even sanitized versions of information publicly out of security concerns regarding what information that may be missed during sanitzation or other wise inferred despite the sanitization and what can be learned about the deployment from the configuration even after santitazation as a result. Together with PII breadcrumbs that are impossible to completely sanitize, posting a configuration publicly is increasing the security risks of that system even
So how do you redress and reconcile the posts with applicable policies of your past or present employer? Has it ever caused you issue with an employer past or present or have you ever been asked about it in an interview?
