As if you needed another reason to be wary of what you post online, here's one anyway: Two Xbox support staff members were fired for comments they posted online on the Web site Kotaku, while an Oregon teen was jailed for a Facebook update.
If it's not bad enough to get fired, there's something even more suspicious about the incident. Neither employee wrote under a user name that could be connected to their real one, meaning how Microsoft linked the Kotaku comments to the person's identity is a mystery.
One employee, which Kotaku dubbed "Bob," was called into his boss' office and told that someone at Microsoft found the comment he left on the site. His boss repeated that employees weren't allowed to say or post anything about the company, then suspended Bob until the issue was investigated. A few days later, Bob was fired. Here's the comment that put him in hot water:
For his part, Bob says the whole event was blown out of proportion. "I believe this entire thing was taken a little too far," he said. "I understand that it can make Microsoft look bad with an employee talking bad about their customers. But what I was saying wasn't as bad as they are making it seem."
The second employee was fired after posting a comment that seemingly told readers not to sign up for Xbox Live's premium Gold Membership. He was accused of stealing from Microsoft by giving away free subscriptions, but was later told that he was simply not allowed to tell anyone he actually worked for the Redmond-based company.
These two weren't the only ones to find themselves in trouble over comments made on the Internet lately.
Facebook has long been a place for people to post wild pictures or say insensitive things under the impression that it was private, but that's been slowly changing over the years. Teenager Jacob Cox-Brown, of Astoria, Oregon,experienced this shift first-hand when he posted a status update boasting about driving drunk and hitting another car.
"Drivin drunk ... classsic ;) but to whoever's vehicle i hit i am sorry. :P," read the status.
At least a couple of people didn't find the post very funny. One called the police to notify them of the post while another shared it with a police officer through Facebook. When the police responded to a hit-and-run incident, they were able to match Cox-Brown's car to the accident and charged him with two counts of failing to perform the duties of a driver. There wasn't sufficient evidence to charge the teen with drunk driving, and for his part, Cox-Brown admitted to hitting the cars, though it was because of ice and not because he was drunk.
"Yeah, sure, I probably shouldn't have posted what I said on there, and I kind of regret it," he said. "You know, because it got blown way out of proportion. But, I don't know...."
"Astoria Police have an active social media presence," said a press release from Astoria Police. "It was a private Facebook message to one of our officers that got this case moving, though. When you post ... on Facebook, you have to figure that it is not going to stay private long."
Increasingly, that's true for pretty much every venue on the Internet, not just Facebook.
