I know that some employers hire private detectives to do things like search out military records, federal criminal conviction records, employment credit reports, personal reference reports, drivers license reports, SSN# reports, educational credentials reports, and civil records.
All that aside, would it be ethical for an employer to plug your name into Google and see what comes up? Read your forum postings? Read your blog?
Do they technically have your permission when you sign? How could they be sure the person they are reading about is you? (eg they couldnt!)
If this falls outside the scope of legality, what law makes it illegal?
Assuming there was some way that they could verify that it was you whose blog they were reading, or that they had some way to verify any information they found, I don’t see why an employer should be barred from researching a potential employee using any means necessary.
The person in question gave you permission to read their website or blog when they put it on the Internet. Whether or not it is ethical is another story.
I’m curious how it can be unethical for anyone to read the things you have published to the Internet for the sole purpose of having people read them? You give your permission for anyone with access to the Internet to read anything you have ever written simply by putting it out there. If you don’t want people to know things about you, don’t publish them.
I don’t see what’s unethical about looking at information that’s in the public domain, unless there is some reason to suppose that putting the information in the public domain was itself unethical.
You could argue that a job selection should be made only on the information which the candidate has supplied, or which he understands that you will use (e.g. when he nominates referees to whom you talk). But I don’t think it’s a very strong argument. If the local newspapers are full of reports about my recent conviction for fraud, I can have no understanding or expectation that a prospective employer will ignore this.
To revert to a specific point raised in the OP, I can see no objection to reading the candidate’s forum postings and blogs, since the candidate himself or herself has chosen to make them public. It might be different if somebody had wrongly published information on the web which was supposed to be private or confidential.
The use that is made of the information found could of course be unethical, but that could be so of any information, whether or not obtained by googling.
-If you find subjective information, thats ok (arrest record, or anything like that, although I dont see why google would be a better source than police records).
But anything thats subjectivly said by another person on a blog, or a blog of that person itself shouldnt be used. Livejournals spring to mind. The reason I say this is clearly the person wrote that stuff in confidence, and not to be used against him, otherwise he would have wrote something completly different.
But at the end of the day, it is the internet. Avoid the subjectivness you find and use the objective facts.
Hmm… I’m seeing two problems. (1) The employer uses the information innapropriately. “Oh, he’s minority. I didn’t realise. I won’t hire him.” or “Wow, he comes off as a real goof on livejournal. I expect he isn’t very professional.” (2) The employer tries not to, but once seen it’s hard to forget.
Shade that is exactly what i’m getting at. What if they did a search for your name and turned up libelous information about you as the first result? What if it wasn’t really about you but they thought it was? What if your name was John Smith and they picked what they found to be the correct website because you mention you live in the correct city, but in actuality its another John Smith in the same city. And as you mention, once you read this stuff it effects your judgement whether you want it to or not.
I think it’s highly unethical to judge a potential job applicant by anything they’ve ever posted to the net. Blogs and newsgroup postings allow people to voice their opinions with much less inhibition than they would experience in real life and with a certain sense of anonymity – however, their opinions at any one moment in time are archived permanently. It’s already getting to the point where something one posted ten years ago is now forever available for scrutiny.
I’m not talking about looking unprofessional in a blog. Certain things one might discover in a Google search would be illegal to ask in an interview, such as a person’s religious beliefs or involvement in politics.
I think a sensible prospective employer SHOULD think very carefully about hiring someone if their blogging/posts amount to a confession of doing things that reflect on what kind of an employee they would likely be.
For example, if the applicant boasts about how much he has been able to steal from work. Or how much time he wastes on the internet while presumably working. Or confesses to pulling dirty tricks on fellow employees to shake things up. Or reveals a pattern of despising the customers and mistreating/abusing/ridiculing them in his ‘service’ to them.
Or what if he reveals a total lack of work ethic or ambition? You are hoping to hire someone who will work hard and want to advance in your company. If his blog is all about working the minimum amount that will cover his bills while he lives for skiing or motocross or whatever…
What if the blog is all about drinking to excess and use of illegal drugs? Do you think an employer shouldn’t take that into consideration?
Hey, if you don’t want people to know these things about you, you shouldn’t post about them for all the world to read.
Ethically, you put this information out on a completely public, widely viewed and very accessible and searchable forum, the internet. That someone should be barred in any way from reading that which you write and freely distribute world-wide is outrageous. What you put in your blog or LJ is NOT written in confidence or in private, the entire point is making those writings public, the forum itself is designed to make writings widely available. How can one state that those writings are private?
Legally, I’d wait for one of our legal eagles to come by, but what law protects someone from being searched on google? WRT hiring decisions, the only restriction I know of are set down specifically in law, race, gender, age, etc. As long as the recruiter doesn’t use these web documents to deny you via an illegal factor, they can use them however they want.
You do not have a right to restrict the hiring decision to information you provide, employers have the right to investigate you privately.
What a ridiculous notion. Why should internet publishing be private? If an applicant writes a book, should potential employers not read it? If he makes personal confessions while chatting up the secretary, should the company ignore what he said?
There’s a term in law (it refers to police searches, but bear with me): “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The idea there is that one’s home is a place where one may reasonably expect that strangers will not be rummaging though the linens, so the government must provide a compelling reason (“probable cause”) for being allowed to do it.
The “Internet culture,” I think, has fostered a sort of “unreasonable expectation of privacy.” People post a plethora of personal information (heh), and yet expect that it will somehow remain private, anonymous, and unconnected. We do not expect to be recognized, nor to have lines drawn between our dots. It’s even considered rude by some folk, as if critical or correlative thinking is some sort of social failing – “how dare he ‘out’ me as a PETA member on the “I love fur” board?” “How dare these strangers read and comment on my completely open LiveJournal?”
When you post on any Internet forum, you create a copyright, and that gives you some legal control over what people do with your words. But nothing gives you any legal rights over what people do with knowledge.
Well it is illegal to when hireing someone ask them their age, sexual prefference, religion, cultural background and several other similar private matters. So I expect it is illegal or at least unethical to attempt to find those details through some other means.
See Illegal Questions in Job Interviews for a long interesting discussion on the related subject.
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Yes and yes. At the same time it would be in the employer’s best interests to take this information with a grain of salt for some of the reasons listed above, and the employer could ask the applicant for more details in an interview about anything that was found. It would not be in the employer’s interests to not hire the best candidate because of information that was false, linked to the wrong person by the same name, meant to be funny, etc.
If you Google my real name, you will find some work I have done in Jewish genealogy, as well as the topic of my master’s thesis and a political organization that I belong to. Although all these items are completely irrelevant to my ability to perform any job I am likely to apply for, they may be controversial to some people, and the first may lend credence to the idea that if you didn’t hire me, it was because of my religious/ethnic background. Sounds like a potential minefield to me.
And what if I, say, had posted something even more controversial about my political opinions, or my status as a parent, or my sexual orientation, or any other potential ground for discrimination? I’m not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether an employment discrimination lawsuit based on information the prospective employer found on the Internet would hold water. But that won’t stop someone from filing suit, and even if the suit gets tossed out, it will still cost time and money to defend yourself.
The potential for errors is even worse if the person has a common name. Mine isn’t particularly common, and yet there is also a British brain surgeon whose name is identical to mine if neither of us lists the middle initial. (And needless to say, I’m no brain surgeon.)