EU Looks To Prevent Employers From Viewing An Applicant's Publicly Available Social Media Information
from the well-that's-dumb dept
Ever since social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became household names here in America, we've occasionally had really stupid debates about just what type of access to those accounts employers should get from their employees. Some states have even passed laws that would allow employers to demand social media passwords from employees and applicants, presumably so that company reps can comb through private messages and posts shared only with the employee's or applicant's friends. If all of that seems stupid to you, that's because it totally is!
But it's not remotely as dumb as what the EU has decided to do in regulating corporations such that they are disallowed from viewing public social media information about an applicant unless it directly relates to the job for which they have applied. To be clear, this new regulation is non-binding at the moment, but it will be the basis of data protection laws set to come out in the future. Still, preventing a company from viewing publicly available information doesn't make much sense.
Employers who use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to check on potential job candidates could be breaking European law in future. An EU data protection working party has ruled that employers should require "legal grounds" before snooping. The recommendations are non-binding, but will influence forthcoming changes to data protection laws.
The guidelines from the Article 29 working party will inform a radical shake-up of European data protection laws, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are due to come into force in May 2018. Their recommendations also suggest that any data collected from an internet search of potential candidates must be necessary and relevant to the performance of the job.
When it comes to privacy restrictions on matters of social media, it seems to me that there is an easy demarcation line that ought to suffice here: that which is public and that which is not. Most social media sites come with handy tools to keep some or all portions of an account private, or shareable only amongst connections within the platform. If an applicant wants something kept from the eyes of an employer, they need only hide it behind those privacy options. This regulation, however, would restrict a company from accessing public information, which should plainly be viewed as nonsensical.
The post notes that recruitment sites like CareerBuilder have seen rates of 70% or so employers that check public social media accounts of applicants they consider hiring. That's as surprising as the sun rising each morning. It's barely even considered creepy any longer to google the names of friends, never mind people you're looking to hire. Somehow I don't see any regulation curbing that across a continent.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: data protection, eu, interviews, jobs, privacy, public info, social media
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
This law can make some sense...
From what I've seen, employment law in the US means that, for most cases, employees are slaves belonging to their employers.
They're expected to answer phone calls from their employer on weekends, evening, and during this thing most have heard of but never actually seen, paid days off. What they do on company computers completely belongs to their bosses.
Even their pee is company property.
In many other, civilized, countries, it's a little different. Even my employer's HR has told me that, "no, we can't poke around in your work email, unless we're investigating wrongdoing."
While the EU law is, um, ineffective, at least it sends a message, that what people do on their own time is off-limits to the employer. How can that be a bad thing, eh?
Treating your employees like human beings...you'all should give it a try some day.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This law can make some sense...
I agree.
And when I read the linked article, the quote that makes it all seem lees dark and troublesome, was this:
And read up on the GDPR they're referring to. It's a legislative framework to protect private and personal data.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: This law can make some sense...
> legislative framework to protect private and personal
> data.
But the point is that if a person has made the data *publicly* available on Facebook or Twitter it's no longer private and personal and is no need of protection.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: This law can make some sense...
I'm sorry, but I don't think a lot of people here understand the thinking behind the GDPR and most European data privacy laws.
The aim is not to prevent anyone (including employers) from reading anything about anyone. Certainly not anything that is publicly available. That would be both insane and impossible.
However, for anyone (including corporations) to act on that information, they will have to comply with the rules.
Someone else made the comparison to anti-discrimination laws. I too see a similarity: while you cannot make someone ignore or 'not see' your skin color or gender, you can have laws to prevent skin color or gender to be a determining factor when applying for a job. Basically, what the proposal is doing, is extending that reasoning to all the other publicly available (and very often irrelevant) information about a person.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: This law can make some sense...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This law can make some sense...
As for your comment itself I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time we started protecting employees and demanding humane treatment. And we should start segregating countries that don't do it commercially.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: This law can make some sense...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This law can make some sense...
And I notice it is only ever Americans saying these EU laws are 'stupid', yet the EU is one of the few organizations on the planet still doing its best to protect the average individual.
And no, this new idea isn't perfect, but it's heading in the right direction.
I'm a US citizen and lived there for over 20 years. I'm now happy to be back living in the EU where my rights are far more protected than they ever will be in the US. A huge percentage of Americans have always seemed to be happy handing over their rights to corporations. Never understood it. Never will.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: This law can make some sense...
> still doing its best to protect the average individual.
Even if it means censoring the internet worldwide, eh?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It doesn't make any sense to prevent employers from viewing social media feeds but it might make sense to prevent them from using the feeds to get around discrimination regulations.
You could learn a lot of stuff from a social media feed. You might learn that the person uses dialect, doesn't have a reliable car, is lgbt+, has a disability or other medical condition you didn't know about, or who knows what else. Many of these things could be ultimately illegal to reject somebody for, but with a bunch of things on a feed and any number of other data in the application, it would be easy to do a little "parallel construction" and claim it was for some other reason.
Not that even barring them from using/looking at social media feeds would really prevent that from happening anyway.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
> You might learn that the person uses dialect, doesn't
> have a reliable car, is lgbt+, has a disability or other
> medical condition you didn't know about, or who knows
> what else
If a person doesn't want the world to know that stuff about them, then putting it up on the equivalent of a freeway billboard on the internet seems a stupid way of accomplishing that goal.
We're talking about info the applicant has purposely put out into the public domain. To then claim to have a privacy interest in keeping it secret is absurd.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Maybe "has made comments on an online forum" will be a discriminating factor during your next interview...
I'd rather not have to actively hide these facts about my person, my feelings, my opinions or my beliefs. I would rather live in a society that allows me to be open and candid, but with laws and rules that protect this private and personal (and completely irrelevant) information from being (ab)used in the course of a job interview.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This isn't remotely as dumb (or fascistic) as laws permitting corporations to demand social media passwords from their employees. That is truly offensive. This is at worst quixotic.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
How is that nonsensical?
A corporation is nothing but a creation of government in the first place. How is it nonsensical if the government tells the corporation it can't do business in a certain way?
No, they can't physically prevent anybody from viewing public social media data.
They also can't prevent anybody from, say, racial discrimination, and if you're not a total idiot and avoid creating a paper trail, they can't even reliably catch you at it. Nonetheless, it's demonstrably effective when they create anti-discrimination rules, because your average manager isn't going to take any risks.
What they really ought to be doing is setting a rule that nothing you do that's not clearly and directly related to the work can be considered in making corporate employment decisions.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How is that nonsensical?
That's not how it works. I can create a business without forming a corporation (if I don't mind putting my personal finances at risk.) That doesn't exempt me from employment law.
<blockquote>What they really ought to be doing is setting a rule that nothing you do that's not clearly and directly related to the work can be considered in making corporate employment decisions.</blockquote>
I wholeheartedly disagree. I'd rather that employers not all use the exact same criteria. The more things you restrict them from looking at, the more they are forced to depend on what's left - and if they are all forced to use the same few things, it means the same people get refused from every job. That's a bad thing.
I have no problem with them looking at what's publicly available, so long as they don't demand access to what's private or use false pretenses to friend someone.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: How is that nonsensical?
The headline is misleading. The recommendation was about "an internet search of potential candidates"; if the employer looked at a social media URL given by the candidate (like a photo site showing previous work), it wouldn't violate that rule.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
From that point, since your ability to pay your bills usually depends on your employer paying, most employers infer that everything you while on their payroll do should automatically belong to them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
For example contract clauses that ban one from working in the same industry for a number of years.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Public Info
If you're well known, should the employer pretend they've never heard of you?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Public Info
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Public Info
Google has received fresh takedown requests after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove "irrelevant and outdated" search results, the BBC has learned.
An ex-politician seeking re-election has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27423527
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No way is this worse than having to provide your social media accounts and passwords to prospective employers.
A law like this would be beneficial. There shouldn't be a "hard luck" approach if you happen to post something publicly instead of privately. It might not even be your fault (the service provider or a 'friend' could be).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Maybe it'll kill off this creepy business, though?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Not dumb at all
It makes perfect sense to remind them they shouldn't be trolling the internet for such information, either.
Whether any of this is effective at all is of course dependent on enforcement.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]