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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as the owner of a small company, I think that the government has absolutely no basis for telling me that I'm not allowed to make one of the most important decisions for my company based on all the data I can get.

If a quick google of a candidate showed a blog post where he's railing about his current job "fuck this employer, I'm going to trash the database on my last day and put a lot of bugs in the source code", then I WANT TO KNOW THAT.

A law that says that I can't know that is BS, and I'll find a way to comply with the letter of the law while still getting the information I need.

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Speaking as the citizen of a country with a constitution, I have no comment about candidates who rail on their current job but I would be disturbed if employers started disqualifying employees based on critieria prohibited by law in my jurisdiction (Ontario).

For example, what if an HR employee can see from their public facebook page that they appear to be a fan of LGBT organizations and are interested in same sex people?

This exposes the HR person to information that is illegal to gather in an interview and illegal to use as the basis for job discrimination. You can also use marital status or interest in having kids if you prefer... Doing background checks that are not strictly work related is a huge issue. Your example is work related, so I empathize with your desire to know about it. But looking into non-employment behaviour opens up a huge can of worms... For employees and employers.

If an employer was a discriminating kind, they'd already have access to a lot of information they would need, even without the internet.

Your sex and race are instantly apparent, age and many disabilities can be guessed, national origin can be figured from an accent, and marital status can be seen by looking for a ring. Even religion can be discerned in some cases, for certain orthodox members.

I agree that employers being able to easily see an employee's sexual orientation might not be a step in the right direction, but I don't think it's opening up a huge can of worms. It's an already opened can of worms.

While your example is pretty extreme I definitely agree with you. At least in the US, posting pictures and ranting online isn't a protected class when hiring/firing for a job. If I were an candidate/employee in one of these cases I would want to know if something I posted, or was posted about me, was influential in a decision but probably shouldn't be required disclosure. One would hope that the decision maker would be forthcoming enough to admit it in such cases.

Yeah, but that just gets you the smart disgruntled employee who trashes the database and doesn't say anything about it.

At least with the idiot, you can keep an eye on him.

No. A very small percentage of people will actually trash their employer's database. It's unethical and likely illegal. As an employer, I would stay as far away as I can from anyone who professes to have nothing against destroying one of my critical databases over a disagreement. The likelihood of running into another person who is going to quietly destroy a database is so highly unlikely that it's not worth it to take this risk.

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