Kotaku posted an article up today about how 2 Xbox 360 support staff have been fired for posting comments on their website which were less than complimentary about the company or the users.
Personally I don’t really see anything wrong with that, I’d have a freak out if anyone from Lazygamer was going to other site and saying how crap a site we are and that our readers are morons. You can bet they would be fired pretty instantly.
If you get into the legality of that things may get complicated but that’s not what caught my attention in the story, what really got me was the ending
While I’ve blacked out both Bob and Frank’s usernames here (at their request), neither ex-Alpine (Xbox support company) employee used a Kotaku handle that was connected to their real names. We don’t know how Microsoft connected their Kotaku comments with their identities. Yet another compelling reason to be very, very paranoid about what you do and say online.
What he’s saying is that Microsoft knew these guys had posted even though the posts were anonymous and Kotaku didn’t even have their real names so they couldn’t have given it to Microsoft even if they wanted to.
I can only guess here that Microsoft is placing tracking software on the local machines of their staff (permanent and external) which is keeping track of what they say and where.
That’s scary, so if you do work for Microsoft in one form or another then be careful what you say about them online else you could lose your job. There is no proof that Microsoft or Alpine are tracking their employees actions but I’d be worried if I worked for either.
Last Updated: January 10, 2013
