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Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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 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.

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