Employee Fired for Facebook Comment
By Ben Haber
June 30th, 2008
By Ben
When it comes to the Internet, you can never be too careful about what you say.
For those who believe that the content on their Facebook, MySpace profiles and personal blogs will not get them in hot water, they’re in for a shocking realization. The Internet is a public domain, and anything put on the Web can be found, and can be used against you.
London resident James Brennan discovered this the hard way, when he was fired from his job in London. His crime? Writing “F— the Partnership” as his Facebook status. (The Partnership refers to the John Lewis Partnership, the chain of stores where he worked.)
Brennan thought his comments would remain private, but some of his co-workers saw his page and showed it to his boss. Brennan was fired on the spot.
Unhappy with his boss and colleagues, Brennan commented on the situation:
“At the end of the day what I wrote was private. You would never get sacked for saying something like that in the pub. I was sacked from Waitrose for something I said on Facebook in my own time. The bosses only saw it because one of my colleagues grassed me up. They printed out a copy of the Facebook page to use as evidence against me. It is an infringement of my privacy.”
Do you think Brennan should have been fired from his job?
Entry Filed under: Web 2.0
10 Comments Add your own
1. racetalkblog.com » &hellip | July 21st, 2008 at 1:15 pm
[...] yet another lesson of be careful what you put on Facebook, one college student in Rhode Island found that a picture a [...]
2. Fetch Technologies, Your &hellip | July 26th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
[...] profiles for awhile now. Employees have been fired for blogging, profiles, and even online Facebook comments. Even a university got in the act and denied someone a teaching degree for their MySpace [...]
3. racetalkblog.com » &hellip | September 15th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
[...] are already plenty of internet stories about how Facebook pictures have come to dig someone in a deep hole with their employer (or worse yet, secure prison time) so as eWeek’s Clint Boulton told us [...]
4. Sandy | January 19th, 2009 at 12:00 am
You know what a friend of mine does? He finds out about all his friends profiles and then tracks them when they call in sick to see if their call in matches with their “activites” I told him he was pretty sneaky…
5. racetalkblog.com » &hellip | March 9th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
[...] now it’s well known that writing or posting the wrong thing on Facebook can get you fired. Yet, another example of this came recently when Dan Leone, a west gate chief with the [...]
6. Debrah Spencer | April 9th, 2009 at 1:57 am
interesting read: http://tinyurl.com/dne3xk
7. tartowalk | September 7th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
@fusildechispas No es vara, sera q pueden ahcer esto http://bit.ly/4t6KbW
8. John | December 16th, 2009 at 5:31 am
It is sneaky and under-handed. Should companies resort to that kind of behaviour then that is probably not the sort of company you want to be working for anyway. Companies would happily spy in your house to see where you are if they had the chance.
The time spent by managers spying on staff is time wasted not making money for the company.
9. Laura | November 8th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
YOU PUT IT ON FACEBOOK. THERE IS NO PRIVACY INFRINGEMENT IF YOU PUT IT ON A PUBLIC PLATFORM.
10. PR and Social Media Blog &hellip | November 29th, 2010 at 8:54 am
[...] the past we’ve seen people get fired for comments they’ve written on their personal Facebook pages. However, despite the many [...]
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