News

Job kiosks, sites may compromise user privacy

November 13, 2003

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- People seeking employment might stop first at the handful of online Web sites that have sprung up over the past five years. But they should beware, according to a new study by the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit advocacy group. Job seekers may be giving away more personal information than they think.

An article on Yahoo News said the report follows a year-long study of some 70 online job sites, employment kiosks and companies offering resume services. It concludes that privacy breaches are more common than generally assumed by users of job sites.

"In an information-rich, digital environment, the temptation to slice, dice, sort, store and profile individuals is great, and companies engage in this practice far more than most people understand," said Pam Dixon, principal investigator and author of the 2003 job search privacy study, in the article.

The most egregious violations occur in the form of identity theft. Dixon cited the case of HotResumes.com, which outright sold some 4,900 resumes to another job site without permission. "Although the matter is now resolved, a person posing as a recruiter gained access to resume databases and stole resumes from those databases for his own personal use," she said.

Many government and state-run job sites still request job seekers to submit their social security numbers and date of birth online when applying for jobs.

The use of cookies, not surprisingly, is rampant, including those placed by third-parties. Oftentimes, the information job seekers enter into forms is placed in "URL strings" that pass the data to advertisers, according to the article.

Privacy policies were lacking in many of the sites studied, even those under the auspices of the U.S. government.