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."

Comments

Does that mean

[MECC]

Does that mean google searches by employee are okay too?

Re:Does that mean

[TrippTDF]

While your comment is funny, it's not a bad idea to Google a potential employer. I made the mistake of taking a job once without doing such, and I discovered the people that I was working for had quite a sorted professional and personal past that greatly effected how they managed the company. Working there was beyond awful, and had I done the Google search during the interview process, I would not have taken the job.

Re:Does that mean

[drgonzo59]

Completely agree on the Usenet. I have the same problem. I was using it when I was 15 and, well, let's just say that some stuff just sounds silly and stupid. I would not want a recruiter to see those results as the first results that come up. But by now, I mostly "fixed" the problem. Here is what I had to keep in mind:

1. Google is good at retaining stuff -- it doesn't care if it is good or bad.

2. Google will show the most recent results at the top.

After you read point # (2) say "Bingo!" and go to Usenet and start posting everyday some good posts. Go to charity forums, help the kittens, puppies babies. Sound professional, give people advice about programming. If you see noobs asking "OMG! how do I do this" then start sounding like a parent figure and politely help them out with their homework programming problem. Then create another account and use that account to rate your previous posts with 4 or 5 stars so they always show at the top. After half a year or a year, depending on how much you post, whoever searches for your name will have to scroll 10 pages before they even see you 1980's posts. Trust me that's what I did and it work. You "can" use Google for your advantage!

From the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this decision give the green light for employers to start Googling their employees? Possibly. It appears in this particular case that the search only played a tangential part to the overall, much more serious evidence against the employee. However, the judges' decision does seem to say that the Google search was no big deal, leaving the question of whether Capell's decision would have been different had the search been conducted before finding out about Mullins' other infractions unanswered. I don't see this that way at all. This guy obviously should've been fired for the stuff he was doing. It's not like he was a model employee. In this case, the judge ruled that the search was irrelevant because the person responsible for firing him already had information showing he had falsified reimbursement paperwork and other infractions. Their own article even suggests the judge ruled this way because the plaintiff HIMSELF made comments to suggest he had trouble before.

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.

Optimist

[Livius]

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.

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

[Applekid]

Hear hear.

And, when not hired for a job, do they EVER get told WHY exactly they weren't hired?

HR: "Sorry Mr. Jones, we didn't hire you because you murdered those children."
Candidate: "Oh, that again. I was AQUITTED, you know. The real killer CONFESSED and is currently serving time."
HR: *calls security*

No, they'd just get a happy little letter that they've declined to offer a job and will keep his information on file for x months blah blah blah.

It's all set to be the new discrimination. What used to be "we can't hire blacks, they'll steal from us!" now becomes "we can't hire people with any kind of bad press around them, they're obviously trouble!"

I wouldn't even be surprised if there were companies which specialize in revenge, where you can google bomb someone's name and associate it with something unpleasant for a fee.

How is anything on the internet trustworthy?

[zerofoo]

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

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

we're going back to the future

[sethg]

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.

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

[Proteus]

it's best to preemptively explain them in your covering letter

Sadly, lots of employers don't even bother to read cover letters in the first pass. If you're lucky, they skim them to find out why you're applying for the position.

If there are employment holes greater than a month or two, your resume is likely to get round-filed before your cover letter is ever even looked at. It's even more true in companies that use software to pre-filter resumes.

My advice, having worked as a hiring manager, is to explain "gaps" in employment history directly on your resume. The rule of thumb is that unless you really were in rehab or jailed, you were probably doing something that should be recorded on your resume anyhow, right along with all of your other employment history.

Tried to start a business? Put the dates down and the name of the business, and your position as "proprietor".

Tried the stay-at-home parent thing? Put the dates down and list "Unpaid volunteer work (variety)". Volunteer work looks great on a resume, and if you get the interview, you'll be asked about it. Explain that you were a full-time parent and volunteered at a wide variety of events your children were involved in.

Took some time to live off your investments and just relax? Put the dates down and list "Independent investment management". At the interview, explain that you spent that time managing your own investments as your primary source of income. It's true even if all you did was keep an eye on your balances. If asked about specifics, politely refuse with something like "I really don't feel comfortable discussing my personal finances."

If you were really in jail, I can't help you - some employers will care, others won't, and there's nothing you can do to change their mind (usually).

If you were really in rehab, you aren't required to disclose it. However, it is probably smart to list the dates in your employment history and mark them as "family/medical leave". They can't and won't ask you about it, and will tend to assume that you had an ill family member or a serious illness. "Rehab" will not likely enter their mind. If they *do* ask about it, it's perfectly appropriate to say (politely) "I'd rather not discuss my medical history".

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

[phaggood]

Newspapers in the UK are just as bad. People get accused of something, and before they have gone to trial, their name is mud. Now, alot of the time when they are found innocent, or the paper had a case of mistaken identity, if they even bother to point this out, it's in the tiniest retraction wedged inbetween some columnist and the sports.

And if I were ever to have this problem, the first thing I'd do create a single-page website with the retraction blown up to a full-screen jpeg, put a link to all the publications that had that retraction, and have an self-playing audio background (flash?) of a phone recording of the retractor stating such. I'd also google-bait the hell out of the site so it was the first thing that showed up.

We all have enough sin in our lives so as not be forced to pay for stuff we *didn't* do.

Re:Google before hiring

[element-o.p.]

It's happened to me. I was in a job interview and the interviewer made a passing reference to a piece of information he could only have known about by visiting my web page (music I had posted on-line). He then added "Not that we Googled you or anything."

While I was a little surprised to find out that they had Googled me, I wasn't upset by it -- in fact, I thought it was kind of funny, and in hindsight, I figured it was probably a good idea. And like someone else posted above, it works both ways. You can Google them (both the company, and your future potential boss/coworkers) to make sure the new environment will be a good fit for you, too.

Re:Google before hiring

[devilspgd]

I've been known to research a person before I buy something from them. In one case I declined to purchase a laptop/tablet after finding a blog post about how many times they'd dropped their laptop and it kept ticking, but the screen was starting to flicker when it was rotated to a certain angle.

An employer/employee relationship is far more risky for both parties, I fail to why any potential employer wouldn't do the same.