What happens on Facebook stays in Germany
Jinfo Blog

27th August 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Employers in Germany may be barred from trawling Facebook for background on job applicants if a new law goes through. Quite a few jobseekers may breathe a sigh of relief – but it could be the thin end of the wedge for both online job sites and due diligence researchers. Under a draft law approved by the German Cabinet, as part of a much wider measure to protect privacy, employers will be allowed to run names of prospective employees through search engines, and to look at publicly accessible information on professional websites such as LinkedIn. But trying to befriend one on Facebook – let alone hacking into an account to get personal information – will be punishable by a fine of up to €300,000 (widely reported – see for example Associated Press at http://digbig.com/5bcgbf or EU Observer at http://digbig.com/5bcgbg or the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle at http://digbig.com/5bcgbh). If the measure is passed by Parliament, Germany would reportedly become the first country in the world to impose such a ban. But the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office also regards the practice as borderline. As the law firm Pinsent Masons points out on its Out-Law blog, an ICO Employment Practices Code says that employers should tell applicants where they got further information on them from (http://digbig.com/5bcgbj) – and a handy Quick Guide to the Code explicitly states that ‘it is a breach of data protection rules to collect personal information that is irrelevant or excessive’ (http://digbig.com/5bcgbk). It remains to be seen whether similar legislation spreads through other European Union countries – or even whether some kind of equivalent measure is adopted EU-wide. But whatever happens, it could make life complicated for some of the new breed of online jobs agencies. As trailed by LiveWire earlier this year (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27896), Monster has just announced the completion of its acquisition of Yahoo! HotJobs, and it has also entered into a three year agreement with Yahoo to become its exclusive provider of career and job content in the United States and Canada (http://digbig.com/5bcgbm). Monster’s sites worldwide have direct links to their own Facebook pages, positively inviting employers to investigate people’s personal pages as well – and Monster.de is no exception (http://digbig.com/5bcgbn). There have been warnings about jobseekers perhaps revealing a little more about themselves on social sites than it might be prudent for employers to discover (try http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27071 for example). This new German move could start to tip the balance – but it might still be pretty difficult for rejected applicants to prove that it was their Facebook pages that blew it for them. Due diligence researchers must be pretty concerned too. They might end up having to apply one law for Germany and another for the rest of the world.

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