Mary-Anne sent a perfect CV, properly spell-checked, with her application for a cracking new job as a programmer at a leading computer systems firm. She had the skills, she had the grades, she had the experience from another blue-chip firm.

But when Mary-Anne’s application arrived, according to a recruitment consultant working with her prospective employer, they ran her name through Google. Up popped something she hadn’t mentioned on her CV. She’d been a contestant in two topless modelling competitions.

“It was hardly a hangable offence, but the firm had dozens of CVs from equally good people to choose from,” said the recruitment consultant. “They rejected her because the Google search provided a complicating factor they didn’t have time for.”

So it was game over for poor Mary-Anne: her modest hopes for a better job were tossed in the bin, without her ever knowing why.

Mary-Anne (not her real name) is not alone, say experts in the field, who are warning that people are increasingly — and obliviously — being judged by what internet search engines throw up about them.

For most of the 20th century embarrassing indiscretions were generally a private matter, easily covered up and forgotten. In the cyber age, however, people who socialise on the net cannot erase the consequences of a moment’s stupidity. Their colourful private lives will sit forever on silently spinning hard drives.

Paul Farrer, head of the recruitment agency PFJ, said personnel executives might first use the net to check a few facts — to see if an applicant really was a school governor as the CV claimed.

“Then you can come across the other stuff, their blog for instance; or you might find a report about a drink-driving offence which obviously isn’t on their CV and possibly not on their licence. If they are pictured showing their breasts at some party, well that’s an interesting one.”

Tom Hadley, external relations director at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said: “With Google you can check a person’s CV, but often you want to find out what makes them tick, dig behind the CV and see whether they will fit culturally within the organisation.”

Whether that extra, often innocent, information matters is purely up to the person doing the Googling, and there is no appeal.

“Being involved in political parties, you can certainly find out about that, along with hobbies,” said Hadley. “It could be that someone is an Arsenal fan and the guy recruiting is a Tottenham fan and feels so strongly that that becomes a negative.”

Early martyrs to our age of online information overload — crushed by a few keystrokes — include Ellen Simonetti, a 29-year-old Texan, sacked as a hostess for Delta Air Lines 18 months ago. She posted mildly provocative pictures of herself in her uniform, taken on a jet, onto her blog Queen of the Sky — since rechristened Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant.

She joined Heather B Armstrong, sacked in 2002 for blogging amusingly about her work colleagues. “My advice to you is, ‘Be ye not so stupid’,” says Armstrong now on her site, dooce.com.

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