Social Networking Sites Being Used for Background Checks
With the influx of social networking sites among generation Y, employers are beginning to scour potential employees’ profiles as a sort of new-age background check.
According to a Privacy Rights Clearinghouse article by Donald Carrington Davis, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have changed the way Americans socialize.
“Employers have begun to tap into these online communities as a simple and inexpensive way to perform background checks on candidates,” he states. “However, a number of problems arise when employers base adverse employment decisions upon information obtained through these online searches.”
Davis says profile searches can lead to unfair employment decisions because of inaccurate, irrelevant or false information. There also is a lack of accountability when searching these sites, tempting employers to make illegal hiring decisions, and employer searches of online sites can violate a potential employee’s right to privacy.
Some people think because of the potential risk involved for employers and potential employees, the Fair Credit Reporting Act should be expanded to ensure fairness when employers search social networking sites.
“Because searches of online social networking services, such as MySpace and Facebook, only stand to become more prevalent among employers, the law must expand to ensure adequate protection to users of these Web sites from unfair, illegal or arbitrary employment decisions,” Davis notes. “Employers also stand to gain from such an expansion of legal protections because they will be accountable to make good employment decisions.”
The Fair Credit Reporting Act is an American federal law that regulates the collection, dissemination and use of consumer credit information. If a consumer report is a factor in an adverse hiring decision, the consumer must be given a pre-adverse action disclosure, a copy of the Fair Credit Reporting Act summary of rights and a notification of adverse action letter. Consumer also are entitled to know the source of any information used against them, including a credit reporting company.
“Lawmakers and policymakers must begin to reconsider the traditional physical conceptions of privacy (i.e., thinking about privacy within physical boundaries, such as a home or an automobile) in order to meet the demands of the members of this new techsavvy generation that have proven much more apt to share and communicate in the world wide web than their ancestors,” Davis adds. “In a world where maintaining absolute discretion in every aspect of one’s life seems both impossible and impractical, Congress must begin to respond by adopting reasonable privacy protection measures. These measures should conform to the modern concept of an employee’s expectation of privacy—an expectation that is as strong as ever—but now with virtual boundaries rather than purely physical ones.”
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