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Judges Rule Google Search by Employer Not Illegal
An anonymous reader passed us a link to an Ars Technica article about a failed lawsuit over a Google search. A federal circuit court of appeals has upheld the original ruling against David Mullins, who claimed that Googling his name constituted ex parte communications prior to firing him. "Through a series of events, Mullins' employer found that he had misused his government vehicle and government funds for his own purposes — such as sleeping in his car and falsifying hotel documents to receive reimbursements, withdrawing unauthorized amounts of cash from the company card, and traveling to destinations sometimes hundreds of miles away from where he was supposed to be ... Mullins' supervisor provided a 23-page document listing 102 separate instances of misconduct. Mullins took issue with a Google search that Capell performed just before authorizing his firing. During this Google search, Capell found that Mullins had been fired from his previous job at the Smithsonian Institution and had been removed from Federal Service by the Air Force."
Does that mean google searches by employee are okay too?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
So according to him it wasn't the 102 documented instances of misbehavior that were presented to him before the Googling that did him in. It was the Googling that confirmed his pattern of behavior that did him in...Give me a break, guy. Not to mention, with a resume like that, he's bound to be hired as CEO for some major pharmaceutical company or something...
This guy's the limit!
What about googling before hiring? Could be more efective.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
A lot of employers do a search before hiring. If not on Google then with ChoicePoint.
That's one of the reasons those Duke lacrosse players were fighting their charges so hard. One of their parents told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" after claiming that this case would ruin their kids life, that in the future when they apply for a job, the employer will Google their kids name and this case will come right to the top.
That's one of the dark sides of the internet. If you get accused of a crime, it's all over the internet. And even if you're acquitted, charges dropped, or found innocent, you're now all over the internet, and people will see that and immediately assume the worst.
Yeah, the guy in TFA appears to have committed all of those acts, but what about folks falsely accused or in the wrong place at the wrong time?
What was it? Keep repeating a lie and it becomes true? Well, on the internet, it's donw automatically.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I got caught and I don't like it. I want to be able to steal from my employer and rip the taxpayers off. Everyone does it so why should I be penalized?
Wahhh! Wahhh!
For as much as we rip government agencies for wasting money, three cheers for NOAA for tracking down this asshat and firing him.
The real question is, and one which is not answered in the article, are they going to get the money back from him?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I still think if you are fired based solely on a Google search, then you would have plenty of cause for complaint, but in this case it is completely irrelevant. This idiot was probably better off slinking away and looking for another job, then trying to fight this.
If they found something about a different person who had the same name, he might have an outside chance of making a complaint.
But from the sounds of it, he should lay low and be thankful there aren't criminal charges. A Google search is no different from, say, searching newspaper clippings by hand. If reality is prejudicial to his employment, it's not his employer's fault.
All this employee protection crap is bull shit. An employer should be able to hire/fire anyone they want without having to go through a bunch of red tape. Same thing with unemployment. There is no reason that an employer should ever have to continue to pay someone they fired because the person is too lazy to get off their butt and find a job. Come on, enough with employee rights, where are our employer rights... And don't get me started on the double taxation that happens with self employment tax. This country needs some serious reform in the way we run businesses. Citizens should be encouraged to start a business in something they enjoy, not discouraged with the threat of having to pay someone unemployment pay because they do a shitty job and you don't want them to work for you anymore.
So, back to the story, why is googling someone illegal? If I'm an employer, yes, I want to know what other employers have though of this person. There is no reason their should be any laws against researching the person you are hiring.
Sam
Honestly nothing to see here
With all of the information people are throwing out there about themselves, they deserve to have it used against them in any shape form or fashion. If you want to be the moron who posts everything about yourself on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and all those other sites, you have nothing but yourself to blame. They fired me for using drugs! If you're the moron with a picture of you happily holding a bong on MySpace and expected no one but friends to see it, you shot your own self in the foot. Its amazing the level of stupidity some people can get to then come back around and point the finger at everyone but themselves. On other notes... Information pertaining to just about anything on the planet is already readily available. Court records, financial information... All this misuse/abuse of information is made possible by the same people bitching who often turn their cheeks when future misuse in the making is present. You didn't say nothing then... Why bother bitching now... YOU GAVE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS TO PRIVACY BY NOT ACTING BEFORE WHY BITCH ABOUT IT NOW?
Infiltrated dot Net
I am glad that this judge saw through this guy's bullshit. Some people just have no clue. This guy was wasting my tax dollars. I think we all should get to mete out some justice to him.
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
And yet, you're still a reactionary asshole.
I've always thought that some of the questions you're allowed to ask (more importantly, the ones you're not allowed to ask) when you call for references are a bit silly. The general rule seems to be that if the person was great at their job, you can talk them up. But if they were bad at their job, or did something outrageous that got them fired, about all you can say is that you wouldn't recommend them for rehire.
I don't know if that's because of some privacy laws, or whether that's just standard "don't send the lawyers after us!" protection. Either way it's struck me as silly, and with that in mind I'm not sure I'd point to search results (unless part of employee authorized criminal background check) as a reason for firing someone. In the same way that, if I happen to know someone that used to work with a "would not rehire" who gives me more scoop on the employee than the official mantra, I wouldn't divulge the receipt of more than "would not rehire" from a referred company.
Then again, I live in a right to work state, employers can fire people at any time for any reason...as long as it doesn't bump into EEOC guidelines. So we wouldn't need to provide a ream of documentation on firing someone (but it does help to have available).
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I can't be the only person whose reaction to the article is to google 'David Mullins', and discover that it's a reasonably common name, shared by the professor of housing policy at Birmingham University, the director of academic administration at Warwick, a 1991 Stanford math grad student, a London-based artist, and the ex-vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
I think it's distinctly unprofessional for an organisation to record the fact that it fired someone in a document on the Google-accessible web, since having the fact available without the explanatory information that you'd get from asking the organisation for a reference might well be prejudicial to future employment for the person concerned.
Google was able to add an extremely loud "Ahhh Shit!!!!" and "...but, Judge...!!??" to their new 'layered' sounds database, coincidentally matching the co-ordinates of the court house where the recent hearings took place...
During this Google search, Capell found that Mullins had been fired from his previous job at the Smithsonian Institution and had been removed from Federal Service by the Air Force."
That's shocking. What sort of Draconian employment termination policies are in action here? Removed from federal service by the air force? Usually, I'd just have a quiet word to let the employee know their services are no longer required.
"Security, escort Mullins from the office. Yes, of course I mean with the F-16s..."
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
They would just query against internal databases...
I expected more from the slashdot community on this topic. Lots of posts suggest that if you put anything in a public space, you shouldn't expect privacy in your professional life.
Here is the problem; What if you didn't put the information out there? Remember the school principal who sued a bunch of students for putting up a fake myspace page? What would you say if the board of education fired this guy because of the content on the page?
I've seen some great "photoshopped" pictures that were very believable. Would you like an HR person to make an employment decision about you based on a fake picture or a malicious blog entry?
Employers, much like students doing research, should only use verifiable authoritative sources for personnel information. The internet (most of it) falls very short of this standard.
-ted
Would this even be an issue if it wasn't a government job?
From the decision [emphasis mine]:
"No ex-parte communication occurred when the Deciding Official, Ms. Capell, discovered for herself that "in 1996, the Department of the Air Force removed the appellant from a civil service position and that in 1997, the Smithsonian Institution told [Mr. Mullins] to 'look for a new job.'" Indeed, the only "communication" that occurred was when Mr. Mullins communicated with Ms. Capell to bring to her attention the negative information about himself "by suggesting he had been subject to Board proceedings before." Ex-parte communications are procedural defects only when they cause prejudice that undermines due process guarantees. Because Mr. Mullins' two prior job losses did not affect Ms. Capell's decision to remove Mr. Mullins, the record shows no prejudice. Indeed, on April 22, 2005, before Ms. Capell discovered Mr. Mullins' two prior job losses, Mr. Grahl had already outlined 102 specifications to support the four charges of misuse and misconduct against Mr. Mullins."
So lemme get this straight. The employee objects to the Googling that reveals his past problems with another Federal agency.
That Google search probabky took 5 minutes and actually saved the taxpayers money. Had the Air Force archive not been available on the Web, Mullins's employer would have issued the proper redtape-littered procedure to unearth Mullins's file from Federal archives. Such a thing involves weeks, if not months, of inter-agency sleuthing, and ends up costing a pretty penny. For the taxpayer, of course.
But such a search would have been so much more official, so much less oh-noes-high-tech-got-me, so Mullins would not have objected, right?
The Pentagon is a public employer. Its agents are susceptible to public scrutiny when it comes to how their salary is justified. As such, it's normal that its employment archives are conveniently available. Don't like it and still want to be a Federal employee? Get a Masters in maths and get hired by the NSA. They don't plaster the web with their employment records, for some reason.
Otherwise, get into the private sector and deal with the longer hours and the sucky retirement and heath plans, like the rest of us.
Kudos to the Weather Forecast Office in Indiana for getting rid of cheating, lying, dishonest employees.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://g27radio.blogspot.com/2007/04/think-youre-s afe.html
That blog is written by a Slashdotter. He posted it in under an identity fraud article a while ago. I linked to his first post.
In short rather that someone stealing his identity to make money, someone stole his identity and used it when arrested. The victim has been turned down for job after job with no reason given. He found out when he was being harassed by the cops and decided to do a search for himself and found numerous warrants, DUIs, etc. Very depressing story considering he's now in his mid 30s and his life has been ruined by 'background checks' and it wasn't even him.
Once upon a time, just about everyone lived in small communities. You would expect to live, work, and die in the same little town where your parents and your close relatives lived. Once you got a reputation in such a community, deserved or undeserved, it would probably follow you for life.
Then we had the Industrial Revolution, big cities, relatively cheap transatlantic travel, etc., and all of a sudden it was possible--difficult, but possible--to make a clean break with your past and forge a new life. Many of the life-affecting judgements that were previously made by busybody neighbors were instead made by impersonal bureaucrats.
Now, all sorts of personal information about us online and searchable, and folks who grew up with the Net are less inhibited than their elders about putting more personal stuff online. It looks like the Internet is putting us all in the same virtual small town. I don't think that's an entirely good thing, but I don't see how it can be prevented.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
to take your place. . .
1. If it's on the internet, it's true.
2. If it's NOT in the internet however, it doesn't exist.
Privacy is terrorism.
I started submitted resumes with a vengeance that night. Four months later, I was finally picked up for another support position nearby--it turned out to be the very first app I had submitted the day I was laid off.
The process sucks. It takes a long ass time for some companies to put together requirements, put out ads, and start really reviewing the resumes. They were in no particular rush, but it had a pretty profound impact on my life nonetheless.
Of course, in the mean time I had joined the National Guard, and after 7 months of contract work I went active duty for training and then deployed to Afghanistan. With small gaps, I have been full time in uniform ever since. The coffee is better and the people aren't so whiny.
Are you really so partisan that you don't see any Republicans doing these things? Not that some Democrats may not be doing them too.
A Google search now will bring a lot more results for "David Mullins", won't it? This guy should not have sued. Now he's that much more famous, and for the wrong reasons. Good luck finding a job now, pal. And pay your lawyers.
Employee is a terminal fuckup. Discharged from Air Force. Stealing from employer and got caught. Why am I not surprised that he isn't smart enough to just take his licks and let it lay low ?
.. if this guy has been falsifying T&E reports and got caught .. thats fraud brother .. over $250 its a felony. Is this REALLY the button he wants to be pushing ?
..
I mean
Meh
Sounds to me like someone got caught and is trying for a sympathy play.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
That happens when you blog your life until the last minute... There's thing you should not blogging... Or twittering...
ghostbar page.
The "hire/fire at will" concept is a sound one. But that doesn't mean the systems we have in place are all "unjust" either.
Unemployment wages come out of an employee's paycheck anyway! When they file for unemployment, there are restrictions on how long they can collect it, and how long they must have worked continuously before they qualify for it in the first place. That's to ensure they've paid enough in to the system to warrant taking it back out.
If you, as an employer, are "discouraged with the threat of having to pay someone unemployment pay because they do a shitty job", maybe you should have done a better job screening your candidate BEFORE hiring them? With so many avenues of investigation available to today's employers (criminal background checks, driving history checks, financial checks, copies of college transcripts, Internet searches, etc.), it's hard for me to feel sorry for employers who whine that a bad employee really screwed them over.
I've seen it happen to small business owners over and over again, but in each case, I knew the employer took a lot of shortcuts in the hiring process. (EG. Hired based more on a concern about filling a position as quickly as possible, or hired a friend of a current employee without doing much background checking first.)
Difference is with traditional media it's soon gone and forgotten. On them there intarwebs, there'll always be a little bit of it stuck in one of the tubes.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Is how can you reliably use Google to screen an employee? In this case, I suppose since the employer knew the guy, it was easier. But let's say you have someone on the slate called "John Smith", even with a middle name, it'll bring up dozens of other people with the same name. How can employers even discriminate.
I believe it was the "Beowulf Cluster Revolt". Apparantly it all started when the employee offered to give the boss a sign he'd made for him (saying, "here's your sign"), and he was just being an insensitive clod about.....then, there was this third event that no one really recalls but the result was PROFIT!
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Don't they usually check out your references and previous employers BEFORE they hire you!? The whole point is to learn something about the character of the person you know nothing about. Once they already work for you and have show themselves to be a liar and thief you don't need a reference or google search to tell you that.
If you must!
Isn't it sad that there were 102 documented instances of misconduct before they thought they could move on this guy! Ah, Federal service. Gotta love it... As someone who works for uncle, I feel for the supervisor.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)???
Why YES actually a fishing accident many years ago in a galaxy far far away!!
This story changed the course of my what-promised-to-be-a crappy day. I mean: Good f*ckin grief, man! What does he expect?
Just so you know, unemployment is an insurance policy, not something that an employer pays directly.
To give you an idea of how little of a deal this is, for my company, I pay about $150 in unemployment insurance premiums per YEAR.
You are probably thinking of severance pay, which some employers offer as a benefit, but it is certainly not required.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
On the other hand, if the information is correct, that'll teach you (or the next person) what the consequences of ones actions can be.
In real life, most people take rumors and inuendo with a grain of salt. They take stuff posted on the interweb with a whole sack of it. Particularly if it is old information and one can show more recent evidence of good performance. On the other hand, if the historical data supports current observations, you're screwed.
Have gnu, will travel.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'm more curious about why all this information was out there to be Google'd in the first place. Where did they find info on his employment history and reasons for being fired?
Was he an idiot and posted it all to his LJ, or did someone leak his personal info?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Let me take this opportunity to say GOOD FOR THEM! Employers should be allowed to do anything they want, even forcing people to work without being paid ever. I myself love to work without pay and I work constantly and feverishly with nothing but the greater good of my coworkers and my company's core values in mind. If hired, I promise to revolutionize all business processes within my reach, humbly giving all credit to my direct supervisor without so much as a peep of dissent. Furthermore, I tend to bring cookies and donuts to work almost every day, I wash people's cars in the parking lot, and I attend several different churches and lodges weekly because I appreciate the different spiritualities and diversities of people so much.