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

Does that mean google searches by employee are okay too?

Re:Does that mean

Sure, but what are you going to do? Fire your boss?

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No, trying to be manipulative has you becoming like the PHB.
However, the phrase "due diligence" comes to mind.
As with testing your code, the sooner you can spot the bug, the more gooder.

Re:Does that mean

Well in Soviet Russia, that did happen once.

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He must've been new there.

Re:Does that mean

Yes, I "fired" a certain Healthcare IT company that was interviewing me after finding out by Googling that they practically run a sweatshop, paying a salary and making people work up to 60hrs/week. They especially love H1B individuals and make them slave day and night, at least for 5 years and if they complain they are fired and are asked to repay the 'legal' fees incurred for their H1B visa processing. I am a citizen, so that would not have concerned me directly but any company that does that is not a place I want to work.

So yeah, if I had not known, I would have been unpleasantly surprised by the working environment. Google works both ways.

Most of the time people complain how "Google has ruined my chances ... blah blah" what they don't realize is that Google can also be used to ones' advantage. If Google can 'store' bad stuff it can also store 'good' stuff. It is not hard at all to create some fictitious online profile (use your name and go to some charity and help the poor kittens forums) so everyone one searching for your name will end up seeing that and think 'oh, how sweet!' Yeah, I thought about starting a personal PR business to manage people's online presense and mold it to whatever they want to appear, but I like programming better...Or at least that's what my online "presense" suggests ;-)

Re:Does that mean

"Google has ruined my chances ... blah blah"

no google CANT ruin your chances. YOU ruin your chances.

when an employer google's you and finds you are a contributing editor to high times and run the largest Hemp growing blog on the web. Or finds your myspace and tells how you stole 3 laptops at your last job and bragged about screwing the man, drink like a fool and brag about going to work drunk,etc.....

THOSE ruin your chances.

google-ing me shows up that I am a Scientist, punk band drummer, am missing in IRAQ, design websites, photography, a scriptural scholar, and a editor at a prominent magazine.

Only if you post your own crap or are so incredibly bad that others post it on the net as a warning to others does the stuff get out there and get indexed. If someone knew the names I used for my research they would turn up my usenet posts going all the way back to the mid 90's but googling my name get's you lots of background noise and maybe my public blog that is sanitized for consumption.

This guy must have been a scumbag to get lots of positive hits on him in google or had a uncommon name like Xyzbt Fazatl'rt

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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,

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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

Re:Does that mean

had quite a sorted professional and personal past

Sorted: all in order.
Sordid: dirty, immoral.

Re:Does that mean

"Sorted: all in order.
Sordid: dirty, immoral."

Right, he sorted by professional, then personal past. Personally I would have sorted by good and evil, but everybody reads data differently.

Re:Does that mean

I don't know about yours, but my past is sorted too--chronologically. :-)

Google searches BY JUDGES ruled ok, sort of

When working for the government as a permanent employee, you are usually entitled to a full and fair hearing, with an attorney, before your boss, who is acting as a pseudo-judge (the deciding official). Thus, in order for the hearing to be fair, the decid

it wasn't

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...

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Not to mention, with a resume like that, he's bound to be hired as CEO for some major pharmaceutical company or something...

Nah, with a resume like that he's got Administration Official written all over him.

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His next job should be NASA PR or a Scientific Advisor. Seems to be well qualified for that.

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I got about halfway through thinking that this guy was a politician...

Google before hiring

What about googling before hiring? Could be more efective.

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I hope my future employers never do that. Someone decided to upload my undergraduate thesis to a public online repository, and to say I'm not proud of that thing would be an understatement.

Re:Google before hiring

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.

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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 flicke

Employers usually do a search before hiring.

Does this decision give the green light for employers to start Googling their employees?

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.

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

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.

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

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

You remind me of a friend of mine. in the late '90s when everyone, including him, was making great money, he was saving and investing - while his colleagues were buying BMWs and big houses.

When the bubble burst, he shrugged his shoulders, and took some time off - he was tired from working 60+ hours a week for years at a time. He had plenty of money saved so it wasn't any big deal. He did charity work, read, bummed around, got into shape, got a masters degree, etc....

When he started getting low on money, he tried to get a job again. Nothing.

He got feedback from two people - one indirectly and one directly.

The first guy just told a friend of his that if he was any good, he would never have been out of work. The second person, a doctor friend, just came out and asked, "Are you an alcoholic?"

The worst is ALWAYS assumed. And it's a sad thing with this society where the thought of somebody being good with their money and wanting to take time off every once in a while is actually a detriment to one's career. In a way, we are slaves to the corporate system. If you don't play the game correctly, you lose.

My friend is now doing menial work and trying to start a couple of businesses. He's actually happier overall. He does miss the 6 figure income, as do we all! Luckily, his wife is in medical.

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It's not hard to get around that, you just have to have that time accounted for on your resume. Basically, put on there that you did freelance work as webdesigner/charity event organizer/whatever. As long as you say you were doing *something* (even somet

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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 hole

we're going back to the future

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 [nymag.com]. 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.

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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.

There is, I saw it on Dr. Phil. A woman had a website offering various servi

Re:Employers usually do a search before hiring.

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.

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.

I think it would be fairer if they were forced to commit the same amount of coverage to the real outcome.

As long as people remember that popular opinion (which most tabloids come under) is not fact, then things aren't too bad. If a google search comes up with a trend of behaviour, don't take it as gospel but use this as a basis for a more thourough background check via more conventional means, e.g: contacting past employers.

Re:

There are two possible solutions to this:

1. Change your name.
2. Flood the Internet with bad information about everyone, so that *all* the job candidates a potential employer searches for have bad press.

I often wonder about people with non-unique names who a

Re:

Doesn't matter if it's true or not, there's always another applicant with a claner record. So what you were proven innocent, I can find another guy with no record at all.

Wahhh! Wahhh!

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?

Optimist

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,

This is bullshit

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

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While I agree with the firing/hiting and double taxation I disagree with unemployment. My story:

Working for a company in the UK (only 40 people os nice and small), they partnered with a University in the states to develop software for phase 2 to 3 cl

Unemployment Tax

And if you are a person who doesn't agree with unemployment then lower the taxes a lot first. My last pay check 33% want to taxes. So I work almost two days a week to pay taxes. Now if that was much lower I could save more and in down times wouldn't be as big of an issue

Just a quick clarification: In the US, unemployment taxes are paid exclusively by the employer; they are never deducted from the employee's pay. I realize that this may mean that employers simply pay you a slightly lower gross salary to off-set it, but i

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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.

Its true. If those six year old kids didn't want to work in a coal mine, they should have started their own businesses. People should just be grateful that employers are kind enough to hire them, and if they don't like it, they can leave and find anoth

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Since there are far fewer employers than employees, the employers are perceived as dominant in the labor market, and nobody really thinks they should need any special protection. I expect promoting small business will help fix this.

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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 right

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An employer should be able to hire/fire anyone they want without having to go through a bunch of red tape.

In most states in the United States, they can, other than for a specifically defined list of discriminatory reasons, such as race, gender, and age.

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Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In other news ...

... water is still wet. You can't claim ex parte on such public information. It's been tried and failed on newspaper archive searching more than fifty years ago. I'm guessing Mullins had little to challenge the claims made by his employeer or the informati

So what

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 [com.com]. 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?

How does this line up with HR guidelines?

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

There are many David Mullinses

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,

In other news...

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...

That's how to get fired

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..."

How is anything on the internet trustworthy?

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

Government jobs

Would this even be an issue if it wasn't a government job?

Re:Government jobs

The (very specific) regulation he claimed was violated applied only to government jobs, not to private sector. So no, it clearly wouldn't have.