Background Check via Socialmedia/Web

New Service Adds Your Drunken Facebook Photos To Employer Background Checks, For Up To Seven Years - The Consumerist

If you intend on responding in this thread, please DO NOT simply rehash all the same old ideas about things that are freely available on the web being fair game or that employers are already doing this sort of screening. I know employers google their potential employees. My concern here is that an established company such as this gives the practice legitemecy and when the information is being gathered and interpreted - i.e. given context - by a bot it makes me very unhappy. A person being graded as "potentially violent" because he is interested in Medieval history or the American Civil War is just disturbing.

So what do you think of the existence of this type of service?

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Comments

Bl8ckr0uter

RobertKaucher wrote: »

Here is a perfect case of inadvertant racial stereotyping perpetuated by technology:

Wow......

That made my day in the worst way.

Ahriakin wrote: »

There's really 2 discussion points here:

1. Is it okay for 3rd parties to collect and publish this information on demand?
2. Is this information really relevant to the suitability of the candidate?

The answer to #1 is yes...simply because it was voluntarily posted on a public forum of some kind.

That's very circumstantial. What about if someone circumvents the privacy settings on that persons facebook/google+/twitter page? What about a hackers breaking facebooks/google's security controls? If an employer says we can't hire you because we saw you sloppy drunk on a facebook picture and you "hid" it on fb, could you sue FB for defamation or libel? What if those companies start circumventing the privacy settings themselves? All it takes is a ToS change and old Zuckerberg could have another Billion dollar payout.

Ahriakin wrote: »

This I can agree with. I just hope that it doesn't get to where crawlers are approving and denying our employment. They already make it hard enough to apply to some of these places and then do keyword searches to make sure you are even worth of getting a real email or phone call.

The answer to #2 depends entirely on the context. In many cases I agree that points often seen as social negatives have no bearing on most jobs and are a simple sign of laziness on the employer's part. But there are some in which it does matter. I think the real issue here is that context will be lost with automation.

RobertKaucher

Ahriakin wrote: »

There's really 2 discussion points here:

1. Is it okay for 3rd parties to collect and publish this information on demand?
2. Is this information really relevant to the suitability of the candidate?

I don't think your answer to number one should be so simplistic. I think any answer to that question must also take into account how the information was obtained. For example, do I have an army of bots that could attempt to friend candidates so as to gain access to their profiles as a proxy for this sort of service? Are said social media site's privacy settings easily bypassed but in a way that "normal" users are unaware of? KInd of like those "paranoid" admins who share synsitive folders on windows systems using the $ so they are hidden but grant everyone full control?

But I think there is a third question here: How is the data being evaluated and used? 2 and 3 are really what I am interested in for the sake of this thread. Although 3 is probably a subset of the second question.

What I find most interesting is that people are very unaware of how the service could unintentionally discriminate against people based on any number of factors: people with military service bacgrounds might be classed as potentially violent, people with cultural and national group memberships might be classed as likely racist, etc. It's not all about not posting drunken pictures of yourself. It's about you posting pictures of your child's martial arts training and being improperly flagged as violent, or you attending a political rally or participating in a political group and being improperly flagged as: participates in extremist groups, or an HR goon finding a way to auto reject people of a specific religion before their resumes even make it to his desk. How many errors did we hear about from the automated forclosure systems? We'll never hear about these, though, because it's a closed system. You're rejected and you never find out why.