Last
updated: 10/04/08
Plea
to ban unis trawling facebook
Eight
children's charities are urging ministers to outlaw universities trawling
Facebook and other social networking websites for information on prospective
students.
They say that educational establishments and employers are combing the
internet to dig up ‘digital dirt’ on young people who have
applied for positions.
The charities have made their plea partly in response to an article
published in The Times that revealed that one in five employers used
the internet to check candidates, and two thirds of those admitted their
decisions were influenced by what they found.
A senior tutor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had also said that he
used Facebook to check up discreetly on applicants for a college position.
John Carr, secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition
on Internet Safety said that pictures or gossip up-loaded during teenage
years should not be used against a young person ten years later.
“When young people put up their personal profiles they are not
thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply
talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into
these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It’s
a bit like looking at someone’s diary,” he told The Times.
“A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting
an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the
pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly
focused adult norms.”
The coalition of charities want to know if discrimination legislation
can be used to prevent universities and companies from using social
networking sites for recruitment purposes.
Existing law requires equal opportunities for recruitment, and a system
where some candidates have sites and others do not, could be in breach
of that law.
David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner, has also pointed out
that despite the privacy settings offered by service providers, more
than half of young people make their profile pages public.
“The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something
undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions
and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students
or employees,” he said.
