Your home page - be careful?

[Steve Hoffman]

It Isn't Just Big Brother Who Is Watching

NY Times 1/12/98


CHICAGO-- When Cameron Barrett taught his co-workers to surf the
World Wide Web, he never imagined what they would do with their new
skills. 

At a small advertising agency in rural Traverse City, Mich.,
Barrett, 24, was hired to teach some 40-something female employees
how to view and produce Web pages for clients. 

In a class, he mentioned that he wrote fiction. So several employees
visited his Internet home page (www.camworld.com), where they found
short stories about sex, humor, violence and estrangement: An
unnamed narrator describes killing everyone in a stark white room; a
snowman accidentally knocks his wife's head off during lovemaking.
("In the morning, the sun came out and that was the last he ever saw
of his wife or children again.") 

After six weeks on the job, Barrett was dismissed. "The owner told
me that two of my female co-workers read my fiction, got scared,
shared it with their husbands and then went to my boss and said,
'Either he goes or we go,'" Barrett said. "They thought the character
in the stories was me." 

Now Barrett, a specialist in new media, stocks groceries on the
night shift for $8 an hour, with no benefits. His former employer
declined to comment. 

And though there hardly seems to be a national epidemic of people
losing their jobs over their home pages, Cameron Barrett is not the
only person in this situation. Workers in Virginia, Texas and
California said they had been dismissed or disciplined for the
content of their Web pages, even though the pages are maintained
with their own computers, time and money. Others said they had been
ordered to modify their pages. 

Both groups said a common directive was to remove any reference to
where they work, making it difficult to publish a resume online. 

The dismissals are legal, experts in employment law say. Nearly
every American worker is an "at will" employee, meaning "you can be
fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all," said
Mayer Freed, a professor of law at Northwestern University. "People
say, 'There ought to be a law.' But there's not. There would be a
huge cost to the economy if every firing would be the subject of a
lawsuit." 

Although they may not break new legal ground, the Web page cases do
reveal a culture clash between longstanding, unwritten standards of
corporate propriety and the new perspective of Web-savvy employees -
the kind of workers that companies are clamoring for. 

The employees, often right out of college or high school, are
accustomed to publishing online their narcissistic scrapbooks of
highly personal poetry, photos, and a lot of thinking out loud about
sex and religion and sex and politics and sex. 

Many of these younger workers have been on the Internet for years,
comfortably saying to strangers what they would not say to a friend
at work. But now millions of people have personal (but public) Web
pages - America Online, the largest online service, is adding more
than 100,000 a month - while still more of their co-workers and
managers and parents are learning to find those pages on the Web. 

In Virginia, more than opinion is revealed on the Web site of Lizz
Sommerfield, 23, a 1996 Yale graduate and Internet engineer who goes
by "SexyChyck." As SexyChyck, Sommerfield poses for 1,000 visitors a
week in her leopard-print underwear. It's not the full-blown
nakedness the Web is known for, but she does carry ads for hard-core
pornographic sites. "I do it because it's fun," Ms. Sommerfield
said. "I like the attention."

Her previous employer, a mom-and-pop publishing company, ordered her
to remove any reference to the company, and she did, but felt
violated and quit. "It upset me that someone was spending so much
time digging into my personal Web site and reading everything and
giving it to my boss," Sommerfield said. "I didn't feel like my boss
needed to act like my parents." 

She quickly was hired at a large company with many Internet-savvy
employees. She showed the site to her employer, who also asked her
not to use the company's name. "Almost everybody at the company has a
personal Web page," she said. "I am the only person who has been
told, 'You may not tell anybody where you work.' I feel kind of bad
crumbling under society's foot." 

Companies are accustomed to dismissing employees for misuse of
computers at work. Many company policies restrict use of e-mail,
limit access to offensive Web sites and prohibit disclosure of
confidential information. Few policies, if any, directly address
personal Web pages. 

he most similar situations in the noncomputer world involve
dismissals of workers for posing nude in magazines like Playboy. Such
dismissals - of New York City police officers, Wall Street
stockbrokers, even a ball girl for the Chicago Cubs - have not been
successfully challenged. 

"It's an interesting dilemma," said Linnea McCord, a professor of
business law at Pepperdine University. "Tampering in people's privacy
goes pretty far and gives the employer a lot of power. But if you can
be fired for bad judgment for sitting in a public place in your
underwear, you can be fired for sitting in your underwear on the
Internet." 

Employees have some safety only if they are dismissed for a reason
relating to race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age or disability. Some
employees are protected by union or personal contracts that limit
reasons for dismissal. State and federal laws protect
whistle-blowers, those who refuse to do something illegal, and
workers who file claims for workers' compensation. Some local
ordinances prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation. 

There are no applicable First Amendment free-speech protections - the
First Amendment restricts the actions of government, not business. 

The employees dismissed in the Web-page cases are still free to speak
out about their cases - and they do on their Web pages. Barrett and
Sommerfield say they do not want to embarrass their employers. They
only want to warn others about what could happen. 

They were bothered, they say, more by Web illiteracy than by
corporate heavy-handedness. Particularly galling is the prohibition
against including Web links to their employers on their pages. Such
links are common in online resumes. 

As Sommerfield explained: "They said, 'Well, we don't want to give
anyone the possible impression that we endorse what's on there.' A
link is not an endorsement. You can link to anyone you want, and they
have no say in it. That's how the Web works." 

Barrett still publishes fiction on the Web. But readers must agree to
a contract. Among the terms: 

"By reading Cameron Barrett's experimental fiction, I understand that
I am able to tell the difference between Cameron Barrett's fictional
characters and Cameron Barrett, the person. 

"I am a sensible human being and do not think that Cameron Barrett is
a psychopath who is going to hunt down and kill his co-workers." 
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