I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf
twitter.com
twitter.com
The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd.
If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste.
EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete
In many fields outside software people with no healthcare, student debt, a mortgage and car payments are screwed. As long as the system keeps the people down, they won't have a choice but to take that job, no matter the Orwellian nature
Hell, inside it, too. I always figured that, although I morally oppose this sort of demeaning treatment, my education and experience in software would at least protect me from it. I thought that right up until my company shut down without warning a couple of years ago and I was out of work. I was a little shocked by how poorly job candidates were treated: hirevue, mandatory contract-to-hire “trial periods”, background checks (the background check I did for the job I have now demanded references for jobs all the way back to 1998!). I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the people who aren’t “in demand”.
1. “Keep your health” up is obviously naive to start with but also ask how many people are, say, hurt in car crashes or on the job every year and how cruel your advice would sound to them.
No? Then my advice can apply to 80% of the people.
Assuming that you are lucky is an extremely poor planning strategy that, yes, much of the time will result in better outcomes than not.
That said, it will also result in some highly negative outcomes in other situations.
Insurance has value.
Freedom of association is a powerful tool.
I made no such implication. You appear to be reading something I simply did not say.
1. I was recently talking with an older relative who had multiple friends experience things like being reassigned to offices which required much longer commutes when they were starting to approach retirement age, despite no change in their work or at the business at the location they’d worked for the previous 2-3 decades. Said relative was very happy to have a union which prevents abuse like that.
More crap jobs is not a good thing, and nobody should want that.
I'd be interested in seeing a source on this, if you have it
Probably depends a lot on your location though unless you are aiming for companies that allow remote. Midwest Ohio vs. San Francisco. I feel like since the job market is so much larger, SF would be much more flexible when being picky about jobs than other places.
Wait until you hit 40. You’ll start to discover how unskilled workers feel applying for jobs.
Background reports like these, along with drug testing for office jobs that don't deal with heavy machinery, are indicative of companies that have unhealthy views of the employer-employee relationship, especially in a country with at-will employment. Steer clear of them.
That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this.
EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any applicant's facebook page over spring-break was too salacious (for example), they wouldn't be willing to hire them, because they didn't want the client to think that they were not 'conservative and judicious and considered' (when I say 'conservative' here, it has nothing to do with left-/right- wing politics in the US)
Employees in a client-facing role have the potential to harm a company badly. Companies are cautious. Now, I believe this twitter thing in the OP is ridiculous, and their faulty use of NLP is beyond atrocious, I think that it is fair for employers to be concerned about linking their reputation to that of "proven" rogues, renegades (I can't even spell renegade, George), party-animals, and revolutionaries.
Do you disagree?
Not at all. I understand that drug testing is required due to contractual obligations and things like security clearances. However, I choose not to apply to such jobs because what I do on my own time doesn't need scrutiny from my employer. I've heard from colleagues of companies in the consumer app space sometimes requiring drug tests for their engineering and non-engineering roles, which is more of what I'm addressing. There just isn't need for that beyond an employer or HR department not liking the idea of someone smoking a joint on the weekends.
People who choose to allow their public online presence to be unprofessional are allowed to be scrutinized by those who care about those things. However, if your employer is hiring companies that use bots to friend your private profiles and mine content from them, that's an overstep in my opinion. Wanting a dossier on an applicant's likes, opinions and a sentiment analysis on their posts is kind of absurd in my opinion.
For one - I haven't thought through the ins-and-outs of this very well yet.
But in this new world, I may need to. I may come back with some questions, as you seem to be quite sensible! :-)
(BTW, IMHO: Bots to friend and mine is clearly over the line)
for the same reason that i object to the public ostracising companies because one of their employees dared to have a personal opinion that is different from theirs.
as long as an employee is not using the company as a vehicle for their personal agenda, its not fair to demand that the company distance themselves from that employee.
in the same vein i expect that companies do not screen candidates for their private opinions.
this kind of screening only leads to a defacto restriction on the freedom of speech.
when sharing my opinion restricts my ability to get a job then i have no freedom of speech.
Edit: actually I think it was elementary school. Even worse.
On the one hand I'm not sure what this says about the veracity of background checks performed at the time, on the other hand I'm glad one job bothered to bring this up and ask "This isn't you is it?"
I ended up petitioning the state of California (a state I'd never even visited up to that point) and providing some key information to receive a letter from the state attorney stating "This isn't the dvtrn you're looking for".
The company wouldn't tell me who the background check provider was so I could try setting the record straight, and I ended up taking another job entirely in the end but it was NOT a fun experience and it's filled me with all kinds of anxiety to wonder "how many jobs and housing opportunities have I just missed out on because a background checker thought I was a felon?"
Holy moly, this is a serious violation of the FCRA (if you're in the US)
I
https://deadline.com/2018/07/james-gunn-fired-guardians-of-t...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/arts/television/shane-gil...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/06...
It's not about "workplace performance", it's more about "can PC nuts target our company for hiring this person because of something this person said/liked? Let's cover our asses like cowards and not hire them if so".
People who have bad opinions should not of course have jobs. They should die on the streets, as untouchables...
Of course this holds as long as "the good side" has the power to make companies fire people for their tweets. If and when conservatives get this power (like e.g. they did in the Hoover or McCarthy era), this practice would be wrong again, and it should all be about "freedom of speech" and right to work, etc.
/s
It's very easy to make a case that workplace discrimination happened, or that a hostile work environment was fostered, when there are public discriminatory tweets by the perpetrator that corroborate with the incidents. It's equally difficult to claim ignorance as an employer when they are, again, public.
Would you want to work with someone that didn't think you should be allowed to exist?
And "someone that doesn't think you're fully human based on the color of your skin or your sexuality" is a pretty remarkable simplification of the concept that someone might have religious, moral, philosophical, practical, political, or other considerations about certain behaviours -- in an era when all nuance is often lost and they are bagged as bigots...
>Would you want to work with someone that didn't think you should be allowed to exist?
First, why would you use a huge strawman as an argument?
There are tons of ways to think X group should do something different, or do or not do something, or that they're not saints, or that they go about Y in the wrong way, without thinking "they should not be allowed to exist". But still people are called out for all kinds of tame stuff (e.g. saying only biological women should compete in women's sports, for example), called out to be fired, etc.
Second, yes, I might not want to work with people who don't think I should exist, but I also don't want to have them fired for not wanting me to exist.
There are many coworkers I had throughout my career I myself wished didn't existed (idiotic bosses), but I wouldn't want to get their fired, cause them pain etc.
And if they wish me not to exist, that's their thing. Even if they show it, e.g. with passive aggressiveness, etc (which happens all too often in the workplace just because two people don't like each other, compete for the same position, have different styles, one is jealous of the other, etc. - race/sex etc is hardly the most common cause of this).
Point being, I'm not some God to dictate who deserves to have work or not. Nor do their families, kids, etc deserve to suffer because I am "hurt" of their opinions. And even less so, their personal opinions, outside of work.
If they behave unprofessionally at work to me or anyone else, sure, have them fired.
Yes. In that regard they are exactly alike most holier than thou types!
People who try and evangelize their religious beliefs for example can be bigots who think they're righteous. By the same token, atheists who evangelize their lack of beliefs can be bigots who think they're righteous. Either way, they're assholes that I don't want to work with.
There were plenty of claimed religious justifications for businesses who wanted to discriminate against mixed race couples, but in the end, that didn't really matter. There is no functional difference between bigotry with "nuance" and bigotry itself.
Sure, there's "no functional difference between bigotry with "nuance" and bigotry itself". But here the word bigotry is used twice in a weaselly way, making it a circular argument, that assumes what it should instead prove.
There's, however, a functional difference between bigotry and a nuanced position that touches on sex/race/etc relations - which was my point.
Except if nobody can have a position in sex/race/etc matters that goes against what an enlightened minority holds, except if they are bigots. Even if there are members of said sex, race, etc agree with the person -- and the "enlightened minority" is often a self-appointed hodgepodge of noise-making people.
My point is that there's a functional difference between bigotry and a nuanced position that touches on sex/race/etc relations - and that the latter does exist, and is often called out unfairly.
Now, one might believe that such a nuanced position is impossible to exist (without being bigotry).
That is, one might believe that nobody can have a stance on a matter concerning sex/race/etc that goes against what some enlightened minority holds, without being a bigot.
I try to point that this is wrong, via reduction ad absurdum.
And my first argument is: there are opinions called out as bigotry which some of the members of the group they reference also hold (e.g. saying something about group X which some X also believe, and being called a bigot about it).
If one doesn't believe that those opinions are nuanced, and not necessarily bigotry, then they should also accuse those members of group X as bigoted against themselves - which is absurd.
My second argument is: why would one believe that an accusation of bigotry can't be off? Especially since any random person/mob can make such accusations, for whatever purposes, and with whatever faulty reasoning -- and not only some ultimate arbiters of truth.
Not allowing someone to work would make them open their own business. They would hire like minded people. They would push some mainstream businesses into bankrupcy.
Sounds like a recipe for more racism. Like you are doubling down.
In Canada we would work with the person and tell people to leave your opinions at home. Magically opinions change quickly when you get to know one another. It is hard to hold on to such views when the reality is so different.
There are not genocidal maniacs behind every tweet that annoys us.
My best guess is that it's a form of Motivated Reasoning for "striking back first" at these imagined monsters.
No, there's not. The universe doesn't care about morals. Societies build their morality. It changes in time and place. If you lived in 1840s South you'd statistically be a racist. If you lived in a tribe you'd have their morality.
>any action anyone takes is their right because freedom
If there's no morality, then any action anyone takes is neither right, nor wrong.
But for a given morality (e.g. 2020 US morality) an action can be right or wrong, or something in between (as morality is complicated, not black and white -- e.g. a murder of someone to steal them, or a murder of a someone who tried to rape you is not equally bad, even though it's equally murder).
>It's equally bad when anyone says anything bad because... reasons.
That doesn't parse.
Second, what's a offensive (e.g. homophobic, sexist, etc) is quite an arbitrary thing these days, with all kinds of things that would perfectly fine for a leftist Democrat to say in 1990 or 2000 or 2010 being considered as such in 2020, and things getting weirder by the minute.
As far as US being #1 economy, that generally happens when the rest of the developed world is in rubble (post WWII). Men being sexist and racist was not necessarily a contributor.
Another trend was more people smoked cigarettes. Do you thinking smoking cigarettes means a more effective business?
Nobody said it was "good". What was said, to quote, is: "So, maybe personal opinions of that nature are not related to being a good developer or a good car mechanic or hair dresser" -- in other words, that it was not really a contributor (pro or con).
>Another trend was more people smoked cigarettes. Do you thinking smoking cigarettes means a more effective business?
No, but I do think whether an employee smoked or not said nothing about how good they are at their job.
You can't know that. The fact businesses almost universally moved to eliminate these tendencies speaks to some evidence that it was to their detriment.
And as far as I know, smokers are not being penalized in the work place, despite taking more breaks than non smokers.
I think people's main issues with this specific software/practice are:
1. It evaluates Liked tweets – if you believe tweets to have too little context to be accurate signals of how a potential employee would behave, liking a tweet contains even less context.
2. Any service that provides data via widescale scraping and auto classifying can and will eventually be reduced to an "authoritative" score.
Start creating your fake profile now. Start preparing to game your online profile to navigate this new normal.
But, it’s still Orwellian and presents a sinister forced blend of personal and professional life
Unless you're getting paid handsomely to do it, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to broadcast your personal life to the Internet.
You might not even know --- and it could extend beyond hiring. Didn't get promoted? Maybe it's because someond keyword matched you for "toxic". The only real way to safeguard yourself is to keep your identity as small and bland as possible, and that's no way to live.
I work at a background check startup that puts a focus on fairness and compliance.
>that's no way to live.
You know it's still well within the range of possibility to live a healthy, fully actualized life without a named online presence, right?
It's possible, sure. But why should anyone have to hide like that? It's the principle of the thing: an ordinary person shouldn't fear for his livelihood just because he exercises his right to speak in public.
Because no one would hire you because you don't seem perfect. Employers are looking for perfect and the real you isn't perfect. No one is. Some people do seem perfect but they only show you a piece. You want the world to accept all of you and the world is pretending to be something else.
You think they are going to leave those beliefs at the door when they go to work? You think women who work for this person are going to be evaluated fairly?
If someone does something in their personal life that shows they would be unable to do their job, it is entirely reasonable to have that affect their employment.
Sometimes people post something completely different and it gets twisted into something like that that's obviously offensive but isn't what they said.
In much the same way this report twists the meaning of every tweet.
I think you give the person a chance and use training if a problem exists.
For sure. But their customers are equally suspect. If anyone's prospective or current employer is actually paying for and using this tool, that's a big red flag in my opinion.
At the least I think it betrays very poor judgement.
Some great people I know use twitter regularly but is that safe? How can someone handle that atrocious interface which doesn't work 50% of the time outside of the app? Can you even be real on twitter without getting lynched by someone?
Maybe someone should make social media where promotion, influencers, marketing companies, etc are banned or not allowed.
E.G the "BIG DICK ENERGY" post being flagged as bigotry and sexism, no doubt they trained on limited data of hand curated "questionable posts" and I wouldn't be surprised if they used a source like 4chan and just automatically assigned negative labels to the vast majority of posts.
In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...
However, in what is probably not just a coincidence, the global issue this is only one facet of is about the information asymmetry between citizens and corporations...
<b>Edit:</b> I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why wouldn't the UK want it's own foreign policy distinct from the US policy? Downvotes welcome. I give zero shits about my HN "karma score".
Reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from The Wire, Bunk using his bag of tricks to get someone to talk. Whole thing is hilarious, but the lie detector stuff starts here:
In Korea, the application form includes fields for height, weight and marital status.
Applied repeatedly over a long time to a large group of people that you have extensive information on where you are aren't looking for information about some specific thing, by an agency with extensive experience in extracting meaningful signals from noisy sources...I would not be at all surprised if they can get something actually valid from it.
Polygraphs could work as advertised for 99.99% of people being processed for security clearance and still be useless, because their effectiveness against people who take the job with the intention of leaking, selling, or otherwise inappropriately handling classified information is nil. The US government has spent tons of money on polygraph research and administration over the last century despite knowing from the beginning that it was a fraud, and has never even once prevented an act of espionage with one.
These things all serve their purpose: providing cover for your preconceived notions.
Sorting comments on a majority average is such a dumb metric. The Internet would be a better place if forum discussions more closely modeled real life, where we simply don't have disagreeable opinions constantly shoved in our face because we don't hang around with those people who have them.
One simple way I'd do it: If I upvoted someone in the past, I'd give their comments and upvotes more weight. I'd also give people a way to visit the other side and break free of their bubble if they wanted to.
This is so, so, so, so, stupid, yet it's presumably being used to curtail some people's job opportunities in a society where you basically need to be employed by a corporation to be a first-class citizen.
There need to be laws against arbitrary background checks. If only our government had a real interest in protecting its citizens.
Did something stupid when you were 20? It's still gonna be held against you when you're 65.
I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it.
It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buying a home or even renting an apartment without online services. The cost benefits of leveraging the internet for most operations (help-desk, ordering, even viewing) grossly outweigh the expense of having people perform such duties. The digitization of life is only going to grow, IMO.
We, the people, are being (operationally) forced to use the internet for more and more aspects of post-industrial life.
For now, our Orwellian dystopia persuades us to use the system. As the "free market" pushes us more and more in the direction of online-only services, AI-driven chat bots and the like, we will reach a point where you must be online to get nearly anything done.
Treat every activity you perform on the internet as if it will last forever. Because it will. And people can judge you for it now and forever; even after you've passed on.
Most of us have nothing to hide; but this perspective is based on our past experiences. We have nothing to hide if the old rules apply. But these are new rules. I can laugh at an off-color joke in the closeness of friends. Do the same online (via a like, re-tweet, share, whatever) and it becomes part of the permanent BigBrother data store... discover-able, query-able, judge-able forever.
Scary stuff.
Why do you doubt it? Super common.
Yes, they do. Actually I'll go ahead and claim that majority of SDEs in those companies aren't active social media users.
I have friends who work at Google who have never tweeted in their life.
So - yes.
Sure, you're going to add more qualifiers now, but I'm giving a counterpoint to your original claim.
As the masses (and I mean MASSES) of people buy into the social media explosion going on all over the planet, these "low-profile" individuals will A) become rarer, and B) start to look suspicious. Whether the sub-population of computer engineers see it for "what it is" or not; the general population apparently doesn't.
Example: I have a friend who, begrudgingly, created a Facebook account and used it rarely. Several months in, he started getting "friend" requests from (presumably) middle-eastern men, often shown with photos of AK-47s. If this is not a clear demonstration of a IS NULL business rule to figure out who might be anti-social, I don't know what it.
I stand by my prediction as well: Over time, a lack of an online presence (in a world where online presence is virtually required to live modern daily life) will be deemed "anti-social".
The lure (both ease and historical/digital facts) provided by scanning social media history will only grow in popularity.
For example went viral that a Christian school very recently expelled a girl because she had a rainbow cake that they seen in a photo on social media, and then heard some kid got in trouble for going to a gun range with his dad over the weekend and posting about having a fun day. Then there was another case with a college student.
Looks like many of these schools are currently being sued too, but recent developments. I think trying to control personal social media is over reaching. Not sure if companies get sued over this, but since many schools are government ran they are opening up a can of worms relating being subjected to section 1983 civil rights lawsuits. Plus schools keep cutting stuff due to funding, like one of the elementary schools nearby cut both art and music completely so I think they should tread carefully if they are going to start monitoring student's social media since they can't afford to be sued. One of those schools thought is a private school, so not sure how far that lawsuit would go since many states it's legal to discriminate against LGBT since not as protected like race is, you can get married on the weekend and be fired on Monday.
Maybe both things are right.
Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.
EDIT: private should be replaced with personal, as opposed to work
Increasingly so. That's one of the many reasons for my minimal presence on social media.
However, it's an entirely different question if its right to be put in the position of feeling you need to do that. I think there probably needs to be some adjustment to the legal situation to encourage employers to mind their own business.
My personal opinion is you should probably control the information you give other people about yourself; information is power, and lots of people aren't very nice or are dangerously incompetent, and it seems like a bad idea to give them more leverage over you.
I think the OP’s point is that your “private life” was never really private to begin with.
I don't think that's the issue for them. The issue is the bad algorithmic flagging.
Why give them that information in the first place?
If you HAVE to go this route...as an employer I'd rather see something like Github's contributions by DateTime showing me when they are most active on social media lol. Ah 200 posts every Monday at 2PM, eh? Interesting.
---
You have the right, and we encourage you to:
View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at privacy@fama.io to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
...
You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io, as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf. Further, Fama will delete all of the data that we have collected about you at your written request pending those same criteria.
---
2) they don't appear to be doing business in Europe anyways (based in California, only contact number is North American)
(Mastodon has both of those, but a social network is only as good as its userbase, and Mastodon's is small and niche.)
Even the background checks to open a bank account are commonly 50+ pages of information.
Whether or not the information is entirely correct (or even for the right person) is a whole other matter. Sure, a company could scrape someone’s tweets or assign probabilities to how likely various accounts and services are owned by that person, but at the end of the day it’s not 100%. Even alerts could come up for news articles mentioning a person of the same name from the same area as the person undergoing the background check, but is a completely different person. Depending on how much someone cares to read the whole report and the analysis versus just look at a few flag icons, that could make a difference.
In the end, as long as background check companies can still sell fear and risk, they can live with the tradeoffs of relying on statistical significance determinations to assess people.
I remember back in the 1980s when large numbers of regular folks were trying to come to grips with the question, "What the hell actually is a computer, anyway?". This phrase (GIGO) had to be repeated constantly. People had all these wild ideas that computers were just magic and could turn nothing into something. And that whatever information came out of a computer, it can't be wrong, because computers don't make mistakes.
After a while, it seemed to catch on and penetrate into the collective consciousness. People would even repeat "Garbage In, Garbage Out!" or "GIGO!" with delight, proud that they'd learned something about computers.
Anyway (finally) my point: it seems like we've regressed. GIGO wasn't common sense, and then it was, and now... it's not again? It feels like computer literacy is moving backward a bit.
Do you want to live in a world where you don’t dare to do or say _anything_ online that can be traced back to you, cause now you even have to factor in shitty algorithms like these? I sure don’t.
I'd hate to think that such mis-touches would harm me personally or professionally.
I do want to live in a world where statements akin to "shut up you f'ing boomer" can be tied to the person who holds or appreciates that value.
I guess they could ask Reddit and Hacker News for IP logs of user ip addresses, especially since HN doesn't delete accounts.
LOL.
You'd need countless IDed writing samples to even give yourself a 50% chance of making a network able to with 50% accuracy match an unIDed writing sample to an IDed one.
Facial recognition is easier (yet still very hard) to implement because there're characteristics about people's faces that're hard to modify unless you're really trying.
Compared to writing style which could differ based on too many factors.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/identifying_p...
?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07...
> I’ve used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in my reporting to access long-deleted tweets from Roseanne Barr’s account and to examine the history of suspicious, viral accounts. However, the Wayback Machine’s archives are somewhat random and incomplete, showing only the last few tweets from each moment it crawled the account’s page.
Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?
There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems.
- Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist.
- The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language.
- There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users.
At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!
The project was called NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Alex Howard of O'Reilly's Radar had one of the most comprehensive explorations I've seen "A Manhattan Project for online identity: A look at the White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace."
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri...
The relationship with Google+ itself was spelled out by Kristine Schachinger at Searchengine Journal: "In Memoriam: The Rise, Fall & Death of Google Plus"
Google was only going to be one of many identity service providers for a program run by the Federal Government called the NSTIC, or National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat...
There were some HN submissions on the topic, but virtually no discussion:
Problem is, however, if you actually use facebook, it is trivial to get your real identity from your vanilla friend network, not to mention that one of them is bound to fuck up and tag you in their selfie.
A lot of asset management companies require regular background checks from their service providers and the service providers have to foot the bill.
Always wondered if there was some kind of kick back going on that motivated the frequency or if it was a legal requirement.
In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.
A lot of white collar employers will usually try to work with poor performers to improve performance, but that's definitely not a given.
>In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days.
This is extremely common in America too, it's called a "probationary period." My husband didn't even get any benefits during the six month probationary period at his last job.
There's also "contract to hire," which is, again, not uncommon in America. The new employee is employed by an external company for a set period of time and the employer can decide to hire him or her (or not) when the contract ends.
Internships are also used as a "try before you buy." Some employers mostly hire former interns for junior positions, that way they already know their skills and work ethic. I worked at two such companies where the vast majority of juniors were former interns.
The odds of mistaken identity are too high with an automated service.
Are they able to do more nefarious things like use fingerprint/IP/device history to connect random accounts together?
I'm mostly a passive twitter user who mostly likes/retweets tweets that pique my interest.
I wonder if these companies evaluate what sort of things you are liking/endorsing and associating that with your character...
> You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf.
But there hasn't been a shortage of volunteers.
But why waste 350 printed pages of paper for that?
For extra credit, I share the same name [spelling and all] with a decently famous musician. If you search for me you'll get him unless you include//exclude an extra choice word or two.
Regarding common mis-spelling, that has been as issue for decades. It is a regular deal of "that's an 'e', not a 'o'".
> The background check company is Sterling Talent Solutions, and it looks like they contracted with Fama Technologies for this part of the report.
I'd be surprised if their AI is more than a "bad" and a "good" keyword list. Results certainly look about as sophisticated.
Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I’ve had two background checks done by Sterling and they’ve never connected the dots.
We demonize those people but they're the ones not letting their freedom of expression be repressed by future job prospects?
8chan was taken down after some mass shooters posted there but I don't know if it's gone permanently or just went to an onion server.