• 30
  • August
    2010

A proposed new law in Germany has gotten the attention of Atlanta employment litigation attorneys. The proposed law would prevent employers from using Facebook profiles in making hiring decisions.

Online research on job candidates is becoming commonplace in the United States, but some experts foresee trouble if employment lawsuits arise from perceived or real discrimination based on information on the internet.

The German bill would allow hiring managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. The law would, however, prevent employers from using purely social networking sites like Facebook. The German cabinet...

is supportive of the proposed law. The bill could be passed as early as this year.

Germany's history of communist and nazi dictators has made Germans very uneasy about being spied on. 

Facebook has taken some flak for changing its default privacy settings, but the German law is not aimed at them, but at employers.

Currently, there are no rules governing how companies use Facebook data.

A spokesperson for Facebook, Sarah Roy, said the company generally did not comment on legislation as a matter of policy. But she said that the Web site's privacy settings allowed users to share information as broadly or as narrowly as they liked, either with entire networks or with a limited number of participants.

Source: New York Times "Germany Plans Limits on Facebook Use in Hiring" August 26, 2010