I was thinking about the same thing. If you go to nude beach somebody could take your picture and put it online and then when you apply for a job they could find that nude picture and could think there is something wrong about you.
Shows there is something wrong with our culture when anybody could think there is something “wrong” about somebody relaxing on a beach while being nude in a non-sexual context…
I don’t want anyone on the planet to be able to see a picture of me naked and it has nothing to do with the perception they’d think something was wrong with me. Merely a healthy interest in personal privacy.
Not to mention legitimate blackmail of the content being sent to friends family and coworkers. Almost always accompanied by a threat to be paid in, guess it, Bitcoin
My family and coworkers would just go "haha who that weirdo sending nudes of you?" They would see fault with that person, not me. But some people could be spooked by the threat, yes. I wonder whether this population is large enough to make attempts worthwhile.
And? If somebody is not offering me a job because of some image of me on a nude beach I am glad they sorted themselves out for me. I would not want to work for people like that.
Do you guys think that the correlation between "interesting work or good pay" and "would not hire a employee who frequents a nude beach" is positive or negative?
(Probably best to mention the country where you work, when you give your answer.)
What might be more useful to ask is 'in my area/social strata/available employer options, would they hesitate to hire me if my nude photos at a nude beach show up when someone does a typical google search for my name.'.
Replace nude beach with 'revenge porn', 'embarrassing rant at taco bell', or whatever.
Relating to the nude beach thread, don't forget that can happen due to things outside of their control (rando comment on a picture someone else took, creeper writing some 'ship fiction, god knows what).
There is a ton of noise out there of course, so odds are even something really embarrassing won't be found unless it makes the social media spotlight of the day, but most sane folks are going to think twice before doing something because of it. Which is enough for a chilling effect.
A great many employers (including ones that many people here consider interesting work and good pay) would hesitate to hire someone with that kind of baggage for public facing jobs. Some of them even for internal jobs.
Tech tends to be pretty unusual here, in that there isn't a lot of public facing jobs period, and they tend to be so in demand (recently) that employers can't be very picky. If you're high profile though, it can still be a problem, because they'd need to ask 'am I ok having this person represent me publicly, when x thing shows up in a Google search'. You might see that in leadership positions, for instance.
A findable Twitter post that seems believable enough from someone claiming you sexually harassed them, for instance, could be enough to round-file you for a leadership position at a FAANG.
Most of the population doesn't have a lot of good job prospects accessible to them - they might have only 1-2 decent employers for their type of work in their area, and have a house and kids - and in some geographic regions, such things that are considered boring in Tech can not only make you homeless/unable to support your family, but get you outright murdered or thrown in jail for life.
I can largely agree with your post except for one critical passage:
> Replace nude beach with 'revenge porn', 'embarrassing rant at taco bell', or whatever.
These three things are in no way comparable.
An embarrassing public rant is direct evidence of you being rude, unhinged, and/or prone to substance abuse. It is legitimate evidence against your character, even if it was a one-time event many years removed.
Revenge porn is not your fault and should not affect your professional reputation. However, I can see how it can paint an unflattering or unpleasant picture of you. Maybe you're being the submissive in a S/M relationship, which pretty much by definition will make you appear passive and low-status. Or vice-versa, maybe you're very dominating during sex and it might make others afraid to deal with you even if you're the nicest dude ever in the office.
Going to a nude beach says nothing bad about your character, assuming you are just sunbathing or swimming and not acting like a douche. And neither does it paint an unflattering picture of you, assuming your private parts are not utterly out of the ordinary.
Those are entirely socially subjective judgements.
Do you think a manager from Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, or China would agree with your assessment? Or who grew up in the Bible Belt in the US?
Especially if the candidate happened to be female? Culturally, odds aren’t great.
In fact, in some of these cultures, I could see the nude beach as being the biggest offense since it was the most clearly voluntary. Everyone has a bad day and gets angry sometimes after all (Taco Bell rant), or can be attacked by an angry Ex (revenge porn).
Not condoning, providing understanding for those who haven’t seen that kind of judgement happen from someone before.
Of course they wouldn’t say it, generally, you’d just be round filed along with 90%+ of the other applicants and never know why.
Unless they’re entertainingly dumb, in which case they’ll bring screenshots. Which has happened.
Most companies don’t want drama with, around, or from employees. They want people who get what they need done, done.
Something comes up that looks like drama? Round file.
And good luck contesting it if they do this - courts generally give quite wide discretion to hiring decisions like this. It would need to be explicitly based on a protected class, which is quite narrow, AND they’d have to have documented it as such - which they’d have to be complete idiots to do.
Oh, and you’d have to know about, and find the documentation.
Do you think HR is going to investigate? The type of company that rejects you for something like that is just going to look at the thumbnail and not mention why they haven't hired you.
But that somebody would need to somehow connect that image with my name.
I mean one thing is taking nude selfies and then posting them on my IG or whatever and the other is random stranger snapping pictures from far away. How would the latter turn up when someone is looking for me? Face recognition? Possible, but I don’t think we’re there yet, or?
It used to be pretty common in California, which is why California passed all it's various laws restricting background check scope and degree of information. Now most big corps farm out background checks to various third parties.
In my experience it's usually the small to medium companies that don't care about stuff like if it's actually legal or not, and it's not like it's hard to do - [https://pimeyes.com/en] is one of a great many.
That said, if a hiring manager looks it up, and passes instead of hires and doesn't tell anyone why, it's not like that would show up in a database or procedure somewhere.
That's only one side though: the other side is that people really like posting their own lives, particularly highlights like going to the beach. But they certainly wouldn't want to do that in the form of nudes. Nude beaches are supposed to be a camera free zone, and people are not interested in camera free zones. If it's not on Insta is did not happen, to paraphrase the Strava addict's creed. Nude beaches are dying because everyone has become too exhibitionist to go there.
