Dr. Nancy Boyd-Lillie, associate professor and acting chair of the management department at UNT, says, "I can see why an employer would want to do this. If the site is not password protected, then anybody could see it. Job applicants and employees give up a degree of privacy when they use these sites to post personal information. Only government workers are protected by the First Amendment and privacy legislation."Privacy concerns usually don't come into play, unless the person is applying for some sort of government job."

Last fall, an executive search firm in Connecticut surveyed recruiters, and found that 75% of those surveyed routinely use search engines and networking sites to discover information about job candidates. In the past few months, an assistant district attorney in Florida and a police chief in northern California have lost their jobs due to postings on their MySpace pages.

Boyd-Lille says this is potentially a growing problem that college students need to take seriously, because Internet searches and social networking sites are growing in popularity.

"Students need to be advised about using potentially personal or compromising pictures or comments on these websites. A prospective employee might not get a particular job based on what they had previously posted," she says.