Legal issues from any form of social network screening

Lora Bentley at IT Business Edge writes that even if cities like Bozeman are no longer ask­ing job appli­cants for social net­work­ing and other Web pass­words and are screen­ing just the infor­ma­tion pub­licly avail­able online, they may still find them­selves in legal trouble.

If, in the process of what some have called “screen­ing” on a social net­work­ing site, the employer inad­ver­tently comes across infor­ma­tion about the applicant’s age, race, fam­ily plan­ning, reli­gion or any other pro­tected sta­tus, and that infor­ma­tion improp­erly influ­ences the hir­ing deci­sion, they could then be liable for dis­crim­i­na­tion on state and/or fed­eral levels.

Related posts:

1. Playboy Offers its own Social Network
2. A look at a few tips Bozeman gives its job applicants
3. Bozeman approves hir­ing inves­ti­ga­tion, releases whistleblower’s e-mail
4. Survey looks at social net­work­ing in the workplace
5. Update on pri­vacy issues