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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

But the employer would, because the firm they use to do background checks will use an IP in the States to do the search.

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Well if the employer is in the EU, they won't. So it's a win for EU, they get a potentially skilled employee.

USA privacy laws are bad enough you can get sicced by a private investigator most of the time with no questions asked, no repercussions.

>Well if the employer is in the EU, they won't.

They would, of course. Unless, someone's planning to build a whole Chinese-style censorship state, it's not possible to disallow to obtain information through VPN.

I think the assumption is that the employer wouldn't do a background check in most cases (education etc. is an exception).

I've never encountered one in Germany and we certainly don't do them with potential applicants at my place of employment. (No idea whether this is because of a law or for different reasons)

So employing company either does, or does not do background checks. And if it does it works irrespective of RtBF law.

No 'background checks' by private investigators in Germany. Some employers ask for a police certificate of conduct. There's a law saying which kind of convictions are listed there (nothing below a certain amount of days) and how long (to allow re-socialization).

Preventing the search may be hard. But I don't see a problem with disallowing hiring discrimination based on such information (which is likely already the case).

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