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Comment by deftnerd | Hacker News Reader

No... Just no! Facebook crawls into every portion of our lives. I killed my account because of its insidious feature creep.

You don't put up photos of yourself in a swimsuit at work and would sue any workplace that demanded that you show them those pictures.

You shouldn't bring your political beliefs into work, and would be uncomfortable if your boss cornered you and demanded to know how you felt about the president or some tax policy.

But, this is content that is often on your Facebook page. By moving employeer/applicant relationships onto Facebook, it's associating applicants personal lives into the sphere of employer consideration.

It's wrong and I hope that nobody takes this seriously.

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Facebook is chock full of information that is illegal to ask about in job applications like marital and family status, sexual orientation, age, religion, etc. If this feature saw much adoption it seems like it would only result in greater discrimination.

Beyond that, this move is surprising to me because we've been seeing a lot of stories lately about Facebook struggling to get people to post original content after letting the platform go wild with politicized third-party content and advertisements. I can't imagine a better way to make Facebook less comfortable and fun than to turn it into a resume site.

While I generally agree with the sentiment that facebook and job sites are like oil and water, how would discrimination with this tool work differently than just searching for an applicant on facebook today? I wouldn't imagine this information would be surfaced alongside the resume, so it would still require an employer to actively take steps to discriminate.

Wouldn't Facebook be the single best equipped company to stop potential discrimination?

E.g. You submit an application for a job posting - once that application is opened, Facebook could block anyone who has used that IP in the past 30 days from accessing your profile.

I imagine Facebook is where most publicly accessible personal data is, if they could be compelled to, by PR or law, they could dramatically curb discrimination.

That would be trivial to circumvent (pick up your phone and browse their profile from that) and would have false negatives (large company with many users behind NAT).

Yes sorry, that was just a trivial example to try to explain my thoughts.

How do you see Facebook stifling discrimination?

It's different because you can set your profile privacy to "Friends Only" so prospective employers can't look at your info. Facebook, however, has access to all that data and who knows if/how they might discriminate (doubtful it would be explicit/intentional, but it's easy to accidentally let bias creep into machine learning algorithms).

It's different because there weren't hundreds of people working on and marketing a tool that actively couples this behavior with actual hirings. Now, there are.

People just need to be smart about making their FB private

People shouldn't bear the burden of trying to prevent others from doing illegal things to them.

That's not to say people shouldn't take reasonable precautions, but the fact that people can shouldn't excuse opening up more avenues of abuse.

I was going to say.. just like you should be able to walk anywhere in any large city and feel safe, but the reality simply doesn't work that way. There are too many injustices and not enough time or money to litigate them all for the average person.

> It's wrong and I hope that nobody takes this seriously

It's wrong and I hope people take that seriously.

I’m pretty sure I remember an article on HN a while back talking about employers demanding applicants’ social media passwords as conditions of employment, so they can go through and look for this stuff. So, in reality the applicants’ personal lives are already in the sphere.

I believe some states have made legislation to prevent that.

But why would anyone ever want to work for a company that would even attempt that sort of thing? That is clearly a sign that they will not respect work/life balance.

Most job seekers are unfortunately not in a position to be picky about the job offerings. I agree it is a blatant violation of privacy though.

You know you're privileged when you ask questions like that which have obvious answers for the unprivileged...

Eh, I read it as more of a rhetorical question given the phrasing.

why would anyone ever WANT to work for a company that... vs why would anyone ever work for a company that...

That was my intention, if a company requires that sort of info and invasion of privacy, they are going to be a terrible company to work for. Out of necessity some people will need to work for those terrible companies. In an ideal world, those companies should be told outright to "pound sand" or less politely to fuck off.

>But why would anyone ever want to work for a company that would even attempt that sort of thing?

Sometimes you don’t have a choice. The only place I worked where they demanded this was my first job out of college and I’d already been selling plasma and working part time third shift at a warehouse trying to keep my apartment while I was job hunting.

It’s scummy but sometimes you need money and can’t say no, and employers know that. Especially unskilled positions or entry level jobs where you have zero leverage.

People ask for things they can’t ask for all the time. Being a property manager in Seattle pretty much seems to require willful ignorance of renters rights because they make money off of your ignorance.

My first job out of school I never had a non-compete because I refused to sign the first one and told them to give me another one, which they promptly forgot.

It said I couldn’t work in Internet Technology for a period of two years. My entire resume and focus. Yeah I’m not signing that. It’s just a formality it’s not a big deal. Well if it’s not a big deal you can change it right?

or, if it's a big deal, compensate you for these 2 years that you're not allowed to work in that domain.

which they would have to - even then a non compete cant stop you plying your trade

To this day I'm disappointed that no potential employer has asked me for this kind of information during the interview process. I am genuinely curious what kind of emotional response a hiring manager would display when told to go fuck themselves in front of a room of their coworkers.

This is my concern as well. Most people using LinkedIn use it in a way that keeps it devoid of political flame wars, pictures of you throwing up after a night of drinking, check-ins at the movies you're going to, etc. But Facebook is just rife with personal life information. I don't even use Facebook all that much, but I can guarantee that I wouldn't want to apply for a job using my FB profile.

linked in is basically a separate facebook account with less photos and personal details. just make a new fb account for jobs with less photos and personal details

the social network can only share as much as you give it, its up to you to keep that content personal and offline. i’m not a huge fan of this concept that people give tons of info to these personal dat selling websites and shouldn’t be responsible for it, it’s the companies that shoulder all responsibility. everyone should be well versed in online sharing

> the social network can only share as much as you give it

You and your "friends".

Why should I not bring my politics to work? Isn't bringing politics to work what got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend?

> Why should I not bring my politics to work? Isn't bringing politics to work what got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend?

There are different kinds of politics. There's the old saying "never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table," and I think the "politics" there are the kind that are more akin to religious belief: beliefs that are strongly held, where compromise is difficult or impossible, and have big emotional components. An example are the big divisive social issues, talk about figurehead politicians, or touchy current events. For these topics, there's a high likelihood that a bitter argument or fight will break out if they come up in mixed company.

I think the politics or worker-organization among peers are totally different and very appropriate for the workplace. There's going to be a level of solidarity between the people discussing them that encourages empathy, and actual social good can come from the discussion.

Even for the politics that "got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend", I think the integration is problematic. Essentially Facebook has traditionally been a social network first, and many people's Facebook activity feed reflect more what they do "off hours" and are more conversational in nature. It is relatively easy to skim profile feeds (entire histories of data), and it just seems like it isn't a big step to imagine nefarious employers running sentiment analysis on Facebook timelines just to eliminate characteristics they don't like... including characteristics it is illegal to discriminate against now.

For instance, in the politics that "got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend" it is illegal to overtly not hire someone just because they expressed sympathetic pro-union views (https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/d...). But what stops an employer with direct links to a profile from running analysis on posts exactly for that? Such a thing it seems would be hard to detect.

Oh, I totally agree, this is a terrible, terrible feature for Facebook to implement and push. People's Facebook profiles are going to bring in all the divisive kind of politics and little of the worker-solidarity type.

You also make a good point about this enabling deniable illegality in the hiring process.

I was just only trying to clarify the kinds of politics that belong at work and the kind that doesn't in my comment, with little to no reference to the Facebook angle of the OP.

But the 8-hour work day was incredibly divisive. People were killed fighting for it.

Divisive between whom? Workers themselves or workers and managers/owners?

I would suggest not discussing unionization with your manager like you would with a peer-worker.

Sure, I agree with your implication there, but you never know what peer-worker has goals of becoming your manager and in the case of labor organization, might benefit from informing mangers/owners of peer-worker organization. What are we left to do then?

The feelings underlying my comments here are that I think it's important to not shy away from divisive topics in the workplace. OpSec only goes so far. At some point we must take risks to create a better future and creating an environment that nurtures open and honest discussion, even if divisive.

> The feelings underlying my comments here are that I think it's important to not shy away from divisive topics in the workplace.

I agree conditionally, since there isn't one kind of "divisive" topic. Some kinds should be avoided, which are the ones people usually are talking about when they say politics should be avoided the workplace. The main thing that comes from them are disruption, polarization, and nasty feelings. Other kinds, like ones that are "divisive" between workers and owners, should be tolerated or even encouraged, since they are appropriate to the context and can lead to genuine improvement within it.

Maybe divisive politics would be an adequate qualifier? Workers’ rights don’t generally relate to people’s self-identities the way issues like Church vs State do, for example.

Are you serious? Do you want to get work done or argue about guns/abortion/taxes/foreign policy all day?

I don't think it's an either-or situation.

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