14 ms·

I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

422 points by danso 7y ago

egdod 7y ago
For those wondering, as I did, who’s behind this terrible report: > The background check company is Sterling Talent Solutions, and it looks like they contracted with Fama Technologies for this part of the report.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  > The smartest way to screen toxic workplace behavior. Compliant, AI-based online screening for the enterprise. I'd be surprised if their AI is more than a "bad" and a "good" keyword list. Results certainly look about as sophisticated.
- Aloha 7y ago
  At least one of my employers uses Sterling, and I can tell you that they never checked my social media, or even asked about it, as I got the paper report from them. I'm more apt to blame the employer than I am to blame the background check company - I seriously doubt they just throw in this kind of service for free.
- causalmodels 7y ago
  Sterling is terrible not only because they’re needlessly invasive, but also because they cannot run a background check. Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I’ve had two background checks done by Sterling and they’ve never connected the dots.
  - greenshackle2 7y ago
    On the last background check I had with them, they marked every one of my previous employers as "unable to contact" and asked me to provide proof of employment. I have to wonder whether they just didn't bother picking up the phone.
CommieBobDole 7y ago
I'm torn between "My god, this is a dystopian nightmare" and "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?". Maybe both things are right. Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.
- rakoo 7y ago
  Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ? EDIT: private should be replaced with personal, as opposed to work
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    Isn't the OP's point that people shouldn't live their private lives in public?
    - rakoo 7y ago
      I used the wrong word: I meant "personal life" as opposition to "work life". I don't think personal life should be done in private.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ? Increasingly so. That's one of the many reasons for my minimal presence on social media. However, it's an entirely different question if its right to be put in the position of feeling you need to do that. I think there probably needs to be some adjustment to the legal situation to encourage employers to mind their own business.
  - cj 7y ago
    > Is it normal to live your private life I think the OP’s point is that your “private life” was never really private to begin with.
brenden2 7y ago
Here's the company doing this: https://fama.io/ https://fama.io/ The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd. If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. You might not even know --- and it could extend beyond hiring. Didn't get promoted? Maybe it's because someond keyword matched you for "toxic". The only real way to safeguard yourself is to keep your identity as small and bland as possible, and that's no way to live.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    IIRC, aren't employers required to provide some notice of background checks, especially in the case where they're used to justify adverse actions?
    - chroem- 7y ago
      It's usually a generic checkbox on the same order as the "We care about your privacy!" tracking notifications.
    - seanmccann 7y ago
      You're absolutely right. Background checks for employment purposes are covered under FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) and a myriad of other laws at various levels. Complying with these laws is not trivial, but the onus is on the employer to handle compliance if they are using data sources like this. I work at a background check startup that puts a focus on fairness and compliance.
draw_down 7y ago
I don't understand having a social media presence linked to your real name, unless it's just a placeholder you don't really use.
retrac98 7y ago
Name and shame these companies until this stops.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  I mean, as I see it the reason companies are requesting these checks is because of all the naming and shaming of companies whose employees were found to have posted inappropriate things (or done other actions). So naming and shaming them seems sort of ironic to me.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Are you suggesting much more aggressive methods?
  - retrac98 7y ago
    It’s about power dynamics. Generally speaking, one bad employee isn’t going to tank a company, whereas this makes it possible for one bad tweet to tank a person’s employment prospects.
marcinzm 7y ago
So the company requesting the background check for a job get's to decide what they'd like included. Which means they believe knowing what you tweet is important. Probably due to all the public flogging of companies where someone was found to have posted "inappropriate" things (or donated to an "inappropriate" candidate, etc.). Where inappropriate is defined as whatever the group of people doing the flogging think shouldn't be done so you get a rather large pool once you combine the definitions from all groups.
tyingq 7y ago
Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth". <b>Edit:</b> I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why wouldn't the UK want it's own foreign policy distinct from the US policy? Downvotes welcome. I give zero shits about my HN "karma score".
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  Or drug-sniffing dogs. These things all serve their purpose: providing cover for your preconceived notions.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Yeah. It's pretty interesting that popular culture like Dateline, 20/20, Forensic Files, etc, never digs into things like "talk to my lawyer", polygraphs or drug dogs. They tow the line of "cooperate with the cops or you're guilty". They regularly position this sort of thing as an admission of guilt.
    - raz32dust 7y ago
      I think pop culture is actually culpable here. It leads to reinforcing lay people's belief in these techniques, and especially in the US with the jury system, kay people tend to have more influence on the punishment.
- bebop 7y ago
  I think the polygraph is really just an additional tool to aid the main goal, which is to interrogate the participant. To this end the polygraph is a useful tool as it provides added discomfort, which can help the interrogator get answers from the participant.
  - tyingq 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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Aardwolf 7y ago
Running a simple algorithm that flags specific words in liked tweets: meh, whatever. But why waste 350 printed pages of paper for that?
- doitLP 7y ago
  They offer the checked person the option to get a report of whatever they found and reported to the company.
  - Aardwolf 7y ago
    Would a PDF not work?
  - Keverw 7y ago
    Probably a legal requirement to provide it, such as credit reports if used for employment or apartments, etc of providing a copy.
Cofike 7y ago
I used a script to delete all my tweets on my twitter however many years ago. I'm not the one to say anything inflammatory/offensive but I just couldn't risk some errant like or retweet causing me grief in the future. It seems like that wasn't a bad move.
- dylan604 7y ago
  And how do you delete something that appears in the Internet Archive? Are you just hoping that people are lazy and do a cursory check?
  - javagram 7y ago
    it won't delete everything but it will make it harder to find, and it isn't clear that every tweet is available through the Internet Archive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07/30/theres-no-good-reason-to-keep-old-tweets-online-heres-how-to-delete-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07... > I’ve used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in my reporting to access long-deleted tweets from Roseanne Barr’s account and to examine the history of suspicious, viral accounts. However, the Wayback Machine’s archives are somewhat random and incomplete, showing only the last few tweets from each moment it crawled the account’s page.
- matz1 7y ago
  Having no online presence can also be viewed suspicious. Pick your poison.
  - arpa 7y ago
    Ah! He doesn't eat meat! Suspicious, suspiciuos. Perhaps a communist, or a homosexual?
    - matz1 7y ago
      He very well maybe， the point is whatever you do there will be trade off.
coding123 7y ago
The master plan of the entire real names thing juuuuust landed.
- arpa 7y ago
  Hi! My real name is Myfronds Callmeh Mahhname. Of course I can provide my national id for identity check, dear facebook. It's issued by proud nation of Djibouti. Problem is, however, if you actually use facebook, it is trivial to get your real identity from your vanilla friend network, not to mention that one of them is bound to fuck up and tag you in their selfie.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  You're ... a little late to that realisation, though I only learnt of this a little over a year ago myself as Google+ was shutting down. The project was called NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Alex Howard of O'Reilly's Radar had one of the most comprehensive explorations I've seen "A Manhattan Project for online identity: A look at the White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace." http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-privacy.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri... The relationship with Google+ itself was spelled out by Kristine Schachinger at Searchengine Journal: "In Memoriam: The Rise, Fall & Death of Google Plus" Google was only going to be one of many identity service providers for a program run by the Federal Government called the NSTIC, or National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-death/283685/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat... There were some HN submissions on the topic, but virtually no discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic
deleted 7y ago
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caconym_ 7y ago
I don't even know what to say about this. I'm speechless. This is so, so, so, so, stupid, yet it's presumably being used to curtail some people's job opportunities in a society where you basically need to be employed by a corporation to be a first-class citizen. There need to be laws against arbitrary background checks. If only our government had a real interest in protecting its citizens.
- lightedman 7y ago
  There need to be laws against background checks in their entirety. People who have supposedly paid their penitence for their crimes are still punished up to 7 years after the fact, or longer, and cannot obtain meaningful employment due to it, and are thus stuck committing crimes to survive. Absolutely abhorrent.
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    Yep, in the state in which I reside (Indiana), there is no seven-year limit. Did something stupid when you were 20? It's still gonna be held against you when you're 65.
    - mnm1 7y ago
      To change this, I think you need to change the culture first. Our culture thinks that once you commit even the tiniest of crimes, your life is no longer worth anything. That's why we do not rehabilitate people and have such long prison terms. Until we fix our culture, I don't think we can get traction on this problem. As long as we think of someone who smoked a joint as not human, deserving not only to be thrown in jail but also to be raped (yes this is part of our culture and there are plenty examples of it) we are not going to fix the issue of denying people jobs for something that did 50 years ago. Culture matters and when it comes to punishment and justice, our society is beyond sick. To me, it's amazing it still stands and hasn't collapsed yet due to the complete and utter lack of thought or motivation towards justice, let alone rehabilitation.
throwaway8291 7y ago
They claim machine learning, but I'd guess their workhorse is a "grep -f badwords tweets.json | makepdf | send boss@employer" kind of thingy.
- allovernow 7y ago
  They're definitely using some form of sentiment analysis, but IMO these are exactly the kind of results you'd get after setting a programmer, with little to no actual data science background, loose to train his nets on data with a limited or absent intuitive understanding of bias from training data. And what's worse is that in their business false flags probably aren't even considered. It's an extra wide supercharged net. E.G the "BIG DICK ENERGY" post being flagged as bigotry and sexism, no doubt they trained on limited data of hand curated "questionable posts" and I wouldn't be surprised if they used a source like 4chan and just automatically assigned negative labels to the vast majority of posts.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?
    - allovernow 7y ago
      I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.
      - BlueTemplar 7y ago
        Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what exactly a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist. In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...
thenewwazoo 7y ago
From their "Privacy" page[1]: --- You have the right, and we encourage you to: View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at privacy@fama.io to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. ... You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io, as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf. Further, Fama will delete all of the data that we have collected about you at your written request pending those same criteria. --- [1] https://fama.io/privacy/ https://fama.io/privacy/
- Auslaender 7y ago
  Isn't this against GDPR?
  - astura 7y ago
    1) no 2) they don't appear to be doing business in Europe anyways (based in California, only contact number is North American)
slvrspoon 7y ago
Online background checks increasingly incorporate all this social info but ALSO link it to other identity data. Next, combine it with profiles bought from data brokers which can include all basic personal info combined with political affiliation and prior salary, etc. Here's some steps to opt out of their databases: https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-guide/ https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-g...
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  So, cross-referencing databases is (usually) illegal for the government to do, but private companies can do it just fine? Am I the only one of noticing a loophole here?
siruncledrew 7y ago
300 pages is not all that surprising considering the amount of stuff that could be requested from some assortment of background check companies by whoever is willing to pay for it. Even the background checks to open a bank account are commonly 50+ pages of information. Whether or not the information is entirely correct (or even for the right person) is a whole other matter. Sure, a company could scrape someone’s tweets or assign probabilities to how likely various accounts and services are owned by that person, but at the end of the day it’s not 100%. Even alerts could come up for news articles mentioning a person of the same name from the same area as the person undergoing the background check, but is a completely different person. Depending on how much someone cares to read the whole report and the analysis versus just look at a few flag icons, that could make a difference. In the end, as long as background check companies can still sell fear and risk, they can live with the tradeoffs of relying on statistical significance determinations to assess people.
underpand 7y ago
How long would the report be if you have your profile privacy on lockdown? ie. all public profiles are private and you don't reuse usernames Are they able to do more nefarious things like use fingerprint/IP/device history to connect random accounts together?
- dylan604 7y ago
  Or just ask Facebook about everything they've linked together. Maybe sign up for some sort of FB service, and then create a business model that abuses the access you've been granted to gain the information you're ultimately trying to get. If questioned about it, just blame some rouge employee as a scapegoat for being a bad apple abusing the trust that FB granted.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
I stopped using my real name on social media in 2016. I wonder if Fama can still associate my posts with my fake names. Because if so, holy shit I'm fucked for dozens of reasons. I guess they could ask Reddit and Hacker News for IP logs of user ip addresses, especially since HN doesn't delete accounts.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Yeah, you shouldn't count on it. Especially if they use neural networks - they likely have the know-how to identify you using your writing patterns (though the needle in the haystack issue might help you against not really persistent detectives...)
  - 0xff00ffee 7y ago
    "Especially if they use neural networks" LOL.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      "LOL" as in "heh, like they have the know-how to use them properly !" or as in "duh, of course they do!" ?
      - p0sixlang 7y ago
        I think that was a LOL as in "your comment lacks understanding of the capabilities of neural networks in it's suggestion a neural network could identify someone in the pool of... everyone (lets even say in a certain area), based on writing style." You'd need countless IDed writing samples to even give yourself a 50% chance of making a network able to with 50% accuracy match an unIDed writing sample to an IDed one. Facial recognition is easier (yet still very hard) to implement because there're characteristics about people's faces that're hard to modify unless you're really trying. Compared to writing style which could differ based on too many factors.
        7y ago
istorical 7y ago
How do they handle extremely common names?
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  The name doesn't even need to be common. There are a dozen's dozen ways to spell my last name, and I've received emails intended for somebody else simply because the sender searched the directory and clicked the first hit they got. For extra credit, I share the same name [spelling and all] with a decently famous musician. If you search for me you'll get him unless you include//exclude an extra choice word or two.
  - JakeStone 7y ago
    There was nothing wrong with your name until you were about 12 years old?
    - drdeadringer 7y ago
      Specifically for the music artist, there was nothing wrong until my mid-to-late 30s. Both myself and the musician artist in question are similar in age. Regarding common mis-spelling, that has been as issue for decades. It is a regular deal of "that's an 'e', not a 'o'".
jocoda 7y ago
Did you have to pay for the background check? A lot of asset management companies require regular background checks from their service providers and the service providers have to foot the bill. Always wondered if there was some kind of kick back going on that motivated the frequency or if it was a legal requirement.
nickthemagicman 7y ago
What ever happened to anayomous message boards like 4chan? We demonize those people but they're the ones not letting their freedom of expression be repressed by future job prospects?
- anon_cow1111 7y ago
  From what I can tell, 4chan went downhill after smartphones became the norm, then very fast after 2015-16. If you're asking 'how could it go downhill any more than it was?' that means most of the hobbyists and content creators left. Most of the popular boards seem to be spam or copypasta threads only vaguely related to the board subject. 8chan was taken down after some mass shooters posted there but I don't know if it's gone permanently or just went to an onion server.
xwowsersx 7y ago
Fuck Fama and fuck any company using them. If you're a candidate and a company asks you to submit to one of these, just save them the time and write a giant fuck you on a piece of paper and hand it to them.
- s45 7y ago
  Nah don't do that. Just ghost them like so many companies do to candidates.
Waterluvian 7y ago
That's wild. I got my first ever background check to volunteer at a high school. The report was three checkboxes indicating "we found nothing wrong"
- t0astbread 7y ago
  A background check before volunteering? Isn't that extremely counterproductive for getting applications?
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Maybe. I work with children and the disabled so that's just how it is. I even had to pay $15. But there hasn't been a shortage of volunteers.
  - brewdad 7y ago
    My school district requires all volunteers to undergo a background check renewed every 2 years. I think it's pretty basic, mainly just criminal history. It's really a CYA for the district should anything harmful occur between a student and volunteer.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RijilV 7y ago
In fairness I don’t use social media (well, other than posting here from time to time), so it’s difficult for me to identify with folks who spend a considerable (IMHO) amount of time recording their activities and thoughts on third party systems which have dubious, at best, privacy policies. My naive understanding of these platforms is for you to make yourself discoverable. Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Not sure who the GP is (I'm not dirty myself by going on Twitter just for this), but I assume a lot of people didn't realize at the time (and maybe still don't), that this is the kind of public discourse that does NOT quickly vanish into thin air, and all of the implications that follow?
ravenstine 7y ago
Anyone who appreciates freedom shouldn't lend so much as a thought to a company that tries to do something like this. Get my credit score, call my last employer, do a criminal background check, whatever. But if you scour the internet for any possible kindergarten wrongdoing I've made, goodbye. I'd rather live in a van down by the river.
werber 7y ago
I personally think background checks should just be like, hey are you a violent person, but before any in person interview I’ve been a part of the person has been internet stalked by the whole group and anyone who knows the candidate or someone who does has gotten the tea. I just don’t see any value in this
Jupe 7y ago
Get used to it... this is the world we (the tech community) helped, even pushed, to create. I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it. It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buying a home or even renting an apartment without online services. The cost benefits of leveraging the internet for most operations (help-desk, ordering, even viewing) grossly outweigh the expense of having people perform such duties. The digitization of life is only going to grow, IMO. We, the people, are being (operationally) forced to use the internet for more and more aspects of post-industrial life. For now, our Orwellian dystopia persuades us to use the system. As the "free market" pushes us more and more in the direction of online-only services, AI-driven chat bots and the like, we will reach a point where you must be online to get nearly anything done. Treat every activity you perform on the internet as if it will last forever. Because it will. And people can judge you for it now and forever; even after you've passed on. Most of us have nothing to hide; but this perspective is based on our past experiences. We have nothing to hide if the old rules apply. But these are new rules. I can laugh at an off-color joke in the closeness of friends. Do the same online (via a like, re-tweet, share, whatever) and it becomes part of the permanent BigBrother data store... discover-able, query-able, judge-able forever. Scary stuff.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  FAANG is full of people who don't actively tweet. G+ was famous for Google execs not using it.
  - Jupe 7y ago
    Ok, fair enough, but try and extend the pattern. What if the technical candidates don't have a Facebook account, a twitter account, a github account, or any other active online presence? Do you think such resume's will jump to the top of the decision pile? I highly doubt it.
    - Balgair 7y ago
antibland 7y ago
In the Twitter thread (regarding Fama): > You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf.
meow_mix 7y ago
Of course, this stock photo looking guy started the company https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mones-45740a2a/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mones-45740a2a/
gruez 7y ago
Whatever happened to the 90s where the prevailing advice was that the internet was a dangerous place, and you should always used pseudonyms?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Adtech happened. Deanonymized people are more exploitable.
  - SkyMarshal 7y ago
    Adtech didn’t deanonymize people, just exploited them after everyone willingly did that themselves, chasing internet fame under real identities.
- mnm1 7y ago
  Facebook obviously.
frgotmylogin 7y ago
I wonder how long it will be before someone competent starts doing this and including deanonymized data from places like HN, Reddit, Twitter accounts without your real name attached, phone location, etc.
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  What makes you believe there aren't already dozens of companies working on exactly this?
  - frgotmylogin 7y ago
    Ha, absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are people working on it, not sure if they are in the pre-employment job screening space.
djhworld 7y ago
Does this include retweets? I'm mostly a passive twitter user who mostly likes/retweets tweets that pique my interest. I wonder if these companies evaluate what sort of things you are liking/endorsing and associating that with your character...
- aeyes 7y ago
  This has all tweets the person has liked that their algorithm flags as bad. Not just their own tweets.
wolco 7y ago
Maybe I'm not understanding. How would the company know the twitter account? Could you give them someone elses twitter account? Why did author give twitter account and get surprised when they have a report based on it?
- astura 7y ago
  My guess is they have an agreement with twitter where they provide the email address and twitter will tell you the account id. They would have the candidate's email address from their job application.
adrianmonk 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out I remember back in the 1980s when large numbers of regular folks were trying to come to grips with the question, "What the hell actually is a computer, anyway?". This phrase (GIGO) had to be repeated constantly. People had all these wild ideas that computers were just magic and could turn nothing into something. And that whatever information came out of a computer, it can't be wrong, because computers don't make mistakes. After a while, it seemed to catch on and penetrate into the collective consciousness. People would even repeat "Garbage In, Garbage Out!" or "GIGO!" with delight, proud that they'd learned something about computers. Anyway (finally) my point: it seems like we've regressed. GIGO wasn't common sense, and then it was, and now... it's not again? It feels like computer literacy is moving backward a bit.
t0astbread 7y ago
If a company asks me to do a background check during application I will just instantly abort. Like ok, if they don't trust me that I'm not an asshole how can I trust them that they treat me right?
- p0sixlang 7y ago
  What about post-offer?
cabaalis 7y ago
It seems against the grain on this board, but people actually think airing all their little annoyances publicly online is a good idea that will never affect their actual lives?
- granshaw 7y ago
  You’re missing the point. This is a bad algorithm that is in effect nothing but false positives, and not even on his posts, but on posts he _liked_ Do you want to live in a world where you don’t dare to do or say _anything_ online that can be traced back to you, cause now you even have to factor in shitty algorithms like these? I sure don’t.
  - cabaalis 7y ago
    I don't think I did. There are misses due to bad algorithm. And yet some of the tweets highlighted are indicative of a highly toxic mindset. I do want to live in a world where statements akin to "shut up you f'ing boomer" can be tied to the person who holds or appreciates that value.
  - brewdad 7y ago
    Exactly. I tend to browse Twitter on my phone. Judging by the number of times I've accidentally clicked on a tweet while scrolling, I'm sure I've accidentally "liked" more than a few tweets that I find abhorrent. I'd hate to think that such mis-touches would harm me personally or professionally.
WalterBright 7y ago
I seriously doubt that punishing people for their opinions is going to change any minds. Totalitarian countries tried that for decades, with severe punishments. All it did was cause people to hide their opinions, and have a fake society with fake consensus that everyone knew was fake.
harrisonjackson 7y ago
Let's put aside the absurd conclusion that you can actually assess job fit and performance based on twitter engagement... you could scroll their feed for 5 minutes and have a more accurate feel for their attitude, humor, and public persona than this keyword matching. If you HAVE to go this route...as an employer I'd rather see something like Github's contributions by DateTime showing me when they are most active on social media lol. Ah 200 posts every Monday at 2PM, eh? Interesting.
leftyted 7y ago
I clicked on their twitter and I'd think twice before hiring them unless the interview went really well.
Jenz 7y ago
So, if you're not on Twitter...
drngdds 7y ago
The main thing I'm getting from this is that Twitter is terrible. Why do likes have to be public? Why can't you choose to make some tweets followers-only? Those two things would cripple this kind of background check. (Mastodon has both of those, but a social network is only as good as its userbase, and Mastodon's is small and niche.)
Keverw 7y ago
I think it's insane schools and companies are monitoring peoples social media, should keep work and personal separate. For example went viral that a Christian school very recently expelled a girl because she had a rainbow cake that they seen in a photo on social media, and then heard some kid got in trouble for going to a gun range with his dad over the weekend and posting about having a fun day. Then there was another case with a college student. Looks like many of these schools are currently being sued too, but recent developments. I think trying to control personal social media is over reaching. Not sure if companies get sued over this, but since many schools are government ran they are opening up a can of worms relating being subjected to section 1983 civil rights lawsuits. Plus schools keep cutting stuff due to funding, like one of the elementary schools nearby cut both art and music completely so I think they should tread carefully if they are going to start monitoring student's social media since they can't afford to be sued. One of those schools thought is a private school, so not sure how far that lawsuit would go since many states it's legal to discriminate against LGBT since not as protected like race is, you can get married on the weekend and be fired on Monday.
mikedilger 7y ago
The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  I'm not sure where this comes from. Any halfway-competent company in a right-to-work state can drop you like a sack of potatoes with no cause or notice, and you won't be able to do anything unless you have a documented history of them doing something stupidly, obviously discriminatory.
  - mikedilger 7y ago
    It's coming from California. Sorry, that's my only experience.
- astura 7y ago
  Definitely not true in America, most low skill jobs I've worked about 40%+ of employees ended up fired. Most for "just not working out" rather than blatant insubordination.
  - mikedilger 7y ago
    California is different than the rest of America, and that's where my experience is from. Sun paid me out 6 months severence pay... it didn't seem fair to them. While working there it took about 6 months of intermittant dedicated effort for our manager to fire one of our co-workers. In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.
    - astura 7y ago
      Well that doesn't mean that it's California law that's the problem (California is an “at-will” state like the vast majority of states), but Sun's policies. Usually corporate policies only pays out severance for layoffs, not firings for poor performance, and severance is hardly required under California law. A lot of white collar employers will usually try to work with poor performers to improve performance, but that's definitely not a given. >In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. This is extremely common in America too, it's called a "probationary period." My husband didn't even get any benefits during the six month probationary period at his last job. There's also "contract to hire," which is, again, not uncommon in America. The new employee is employed by an external company for a set period of time and the employer can decide to hire him or her (or not) when the contract ends. Internships are also used as a "try before you buy." Some employers mostly hire former interns for junior positions, that way they already know their skills and work ethic. I worked at two such companies where the vast majority of juniors were former interns.
wespiser_2018 7y ago
I've built a very similar algorithm and website for a class I was taking a few years ago, however, we never considered monetizing it like this: https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems. - Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist. - The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language. - There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users. At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!
iamleppert 7y ago
Startup idea: A service that seeds the Internet with only a fake, G-rated version of yourself that shows you liking pictures of kittens, automatically posting inspirational quotes, completely politically correct.
1290cc 7y ago
So its the equivalent of a credit check but focused on how you conduct yourself online. I'm okay with this only if its law that the report details are shared with the applicant. The odds of mistaken identity are too high with an automated service.

422 points by danso 7y ago

For those wondering, as I did, who’s behind this terrible report: > The background check company is Sterling Talent Solutions, and it looks like they contracted with Fama Technologies for this part of the report.

blattimwind 7y ago
> The smartest way to screen toxic workplace behavior. Compliant, AI-based online screening for the enterprise. I'd be surprised if their AI is more than a "bad" and a "good" keyword list. Results certainly look about as sophisticated.
Aloha 7y ago
At least one of my employers uses Sterling, and I can tell you that they never checked my social media, or even asked about it, as I got the paper report from them. I'm more apt to blame the employer than I am to blame the background check company - I seriously doubt they just throw in this kind of service for free.
causalmodels 7y ago
Sterling is terrible not only because they’re needlessly invasive, but also because they cannot run a background check. Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I’ve had two background checks done by Sterling and they’ve never connected the dots.
- greenshackle2 7y ago
  On the last background check I had with them, they marked every one of my previous employers as "unable to contact" and asked me to provide proof of employment. I have to wonder whether they just didn't bother picking up the phone.

CommieBobDole 7y ago

I'm torn between "My god, this is a dystopian nightmare" and "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?". Maybe both things are right. Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.

rakoo 7y ago
Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ? EDIT: private should be replaced with personal, as opposed to work
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Isn't the OP's point that people shouldn't live their private lives in public?
  - rakoo 7y ago
    I used the wrong word: I meant "personal life" as opposition to "work life". I don't think personal life should be done in private.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ? Increasingly so. That's one of the many reasons for my minimal presence on social media. However, it's an entirely different question if its right to be put in the position of feeling you need to do that. I think there probably needs to be some adjustment to the legal situation to encourage employers to mind their own business.
- cj 7y ago
  > Is it normal to live your private life I think the OP’s point is that your “private life” was never really private to begin with.

brenden2 7y ago

Here's the company doing this: https://fama.io/ https://fama.io/ The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd. If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete

quotemstr 7y ago
> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. You might not even know --- and it could extend beyond hiring. Didn't get promoted? Maybe it's because someond keyword matched you for "toxic". The only real way to safeguard yourself is to keep your identity as small and bland as possible, and that's no way to live.
- ardy42 7y ago
  IIRC, aren't employers required to provide some notice of background checks, especially in the case where they're used to justify adverse actions?
  - chroem- 7y ago
    It's usually a generic checkbox on the same order as the "We care about your privacy!" tracking notifications.
  - seanmccann 7y ago
    You're absolutely right. Background checks for employment purposes are covered under FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) and a myriad of other laws at various levels. Complying with these laws is not trivial, but the onus is on the employer to handle compliance if they are using data sources like this. I work at a background check startup that puts a focus on fairness and compliance.

draw_down 7y ago

I don't understand having a social media presence linked to your real name, unless it's just a placeholder you don't really use.

retrac98 7y ago

Name and shame these companies until this stops.

marcinzm 7y ago
I mean, as I see it the reason companies are requesting these checks is because of all the naming and shaming of companies whose employees were found to have posted inappropriate things (or done other actions). So naming and shaming them seems sort of ironic to me.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Are you suggesting much more aggressive methods?
- retrac98 7y ago
  It’s about power dynamics. Generally speaking, one bad employee isn’t going to tank a company, whereas this makes it possible for one bad tweet to tank a person’s employment prospects.

marcinzm 7y ago

So the company requesting the background check for a job get's to decide what they'd like included. Which means they believe knowing what you tweet is important. Probably due to all the public flogging of companies where someone was found to have posted "inappropriate" things (or donated to an "inappropriate" candidate, etc.). Where inappropriate is defined as whatever the group of people doing the flogging think shouldn't be done so you get a rather large pool once you combine the definitions from all groups.

tyingq 7y ago

Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth". <b>Edit:</b> I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why wouldn't the UK want it's own foreign policy distinct from the US policy? Downvotes welcome. I give zero shits about my HN "karma score".

aguyfromnb 7y ago
Or drug-sniffing dogs. These things all serve their purpose: providing cover for your preconceived notions.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Yeah. It's pretty interesting that popular culture like Dateline, 20/20, Forensic Files, etc, never digs into things like "talk to my lawyer", polygraphs or drug dogs. They tow the line of "cooperate with the cops or you're guilty". They regularly position this sort of thing as an admission of guilt.
  - raz32dust 7y ago
    I think pop culture is actually culpable here. It leads to reinforcing lay people's belief in these techniques, and especially in the US with the jury system, kay people tend to have more influence on the punishment.
bebop 7y ago
I think the polygraph is really just an additional tool to aid the main goal, which is to interrogate the participant. To this end the polygraph is a useful tool as it provides added discomfort, which can help the interrogator get answers from the participant.
- tyingq 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Aardwolf 7y ago

Running a simple algorithm that flags specific words in liked tweets: meh, whatever. But why waste 350 printed pages of paper for that?

doitLP 7y ago
They offer the checked person the option to get a report of whatever they found and reported to the company.
- Aardwolf 7y ago
  Would a PDF not work?
- Keverw 7y ago
  Probably a legal requirement to provide it, such as credit reports if used for employment or apartments, etc of providing a copy.

Cofike 7y ago

I used a script to delete all my tweets on my twitter however many years ago. I'm not the one to say anything inflammatory/offensive but I just couldn't risk some errant like or retweet causing me grief in the future. It seems like that wasn't a bad move.

dylan604 7y ago
And how do you delete something that appears in the Internet Archive? Are you just hoping that people are lazy and do a cursory check?
- javagram 7y ago
  it won't delete everything but it will make it harder to find, and it isn't clear that every tweet is available through the Internet Archive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07/30/theres-no-good-reason-to-keep-old-tweets-online-heres-how-to-delete-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/07... > I’ve used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in my reporting to access long-deleted tweets from Roseanne Barr’s account and to examine the history of suspicious, viral accounts. However, the Wayback Machine’s archives are somewhat random and incomplete, showing only the last few tweets from each moment it crawled the account’s page.
matz1 7y ago
Having no online presence can also be viewed suspicious. Pick your poison.
- arpa 7y ago
  Ah! He doesn't eat meat! Suspicious, suspiciuos. Perhaps a communist, or a homosexual?
  - matz1 7y ago
    He very well maybe， the point is whatever you do there will be trade off.

coding123 7y ago

The master plan of the entire real names thing juuuuust landed.

arpa 7y ago
Hi! My real name is Myfronds Callmeh Mahhname. Of course I can provide my national id for identity check, dear facebook. It's issued by proud nation of Djibouti. Problem is, however, if you actually use facebook, it is trivial to get your real identity from your vanilla friend network, not to mention that one of them is bound to fuck up and tag you in their selfie.
dredmorbius 7y ago
You're ... a little late to that realisation, though I only learnt of this a little over a year ago myself as Google+ was shutting down. The project was called NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Alex Howard of O'Reilly's Radar had one of the most comprehensive explorations I've seen "A Manhattan Project for online identity: A look at the White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace." http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-privacy.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri... The relationship with Google+ itself was spelled out by Kristine Schachinger at Searchengine Journal: "In Memoriam: The Rise, Fall & Death of Google Plus" Google was only going to be one of many identity service providers for a program run by the Federal Government called the NSTIC, or National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-death/283685/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat... There were some HN submissions on the topic, but virtually no discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nstic

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

caconym_ 7y ago

I don't even know what to say about this. I'm speechless. This is so, so, so, so, stupid, yet it's presumably being used to curtail some people's job opportunities in a society where you basically need to be employed by a corporation to be a first-class citizen. There need to be laws against arbitrary background checks. If only our government had a real interest in protecting its citizens.

lightedman 7y ago
There need to be laws against background checks in their entirety. People who have supposedly paid their penitence for their crimes are still punished up to 7 years after the fact, or longer, and cannot obtain meaningful employment due to it, and are thus stuck committing crimes to survive. Absolutely abhorrent.
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  Yep, in the state in which I reside (Indiana), there is no seven-year limit. Did something stupid when you were 20? It's still gonna be held against you when you're 65.
  - mnm1 7y ago
    To change this, I think you need to change the culture first. Our culture thinks that once you commit even the tiniest of crimes, your life is no longer worth anything. That's why we do not rehabilitate people and have such long prison terms. Until we fix our culture, I don't think we can get traction on this problem. As long as we think of someone who smoked a joint as not human, deserving not only to be thrown in jail but also to be raped (yes this is part of our culture and there are plenty examples of it) we are not going to fix the issue of denying people jobs for something that did 50 years ago. Culture matters and when it comes to punishment and justice, our society is beyond sick. To me, it's amazing it still stands and hasn't collapsed yet due to the complete and utter lack of thought or motivation towards justice, let alone rehabilitation.

throwaway8291 7y ago

They claim machine learning, but I'd guess their workhorse is a "grep -f badwords tweets.json | makepdf | send boss@employer" kind of thingy.

allovernow 7y ago
They're definitely using some form of sentiment analysis, but IMO these are exactly the kind of results you'd get after setting a programmer, with little to no actual data science background, loose to train his nets on data with a limited or absent intuitive understanding of bias from training data. And what's worse is that in their business false flags probably aren't even considered. It's an extra wide supercharged net. E.G the "BIG DICK ENERGY" post being flagged as bigotry and sexism, no doubt they trained on limited data of hand curated "questionable posts" and I wouldn't be surprised if they used a source like 4chan and just automatically assigned negative labels to the vast majority of posts.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?
  - allovernow 7y ago
    I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what exactly a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist. In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...

thenewwazoo 7y ago

From their "Privacy" page[1]: --- You have the right, and we encourage you to: View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at privacy@fama.io to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. ... You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io, as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf. Further, Fama will delete all of the data that we have collected about you at your written request pending those same criteria. --- [1] https://fama.io/privacy/ https://fama.io/privacy/

Auslaender 7y ago
Isn't this against GDPR?
- astura 7y ago
  1) no 2) they don't appear to be doing business in Europe anyways (based in California, only contact number is North American)

slvrspoon 7y ago

Online background checks increasingly incorporate all this social info but ALSO link it to other identity data. Next, combine it with profiles bought from data brokers which can include all basic personal info combined with political affiliation and prior salary, etc. Here's some steps to opt out of their databases: https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-guide/ https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-g...

BlueTemplar 7y ago
So, cross-referencing databases is (usually) illegal for the government to do, but private companies can do it just fine? Am I the only one of noticing a loophole here?

siruncledrew 7y ago

300 pages is not all that surprising considering the amount of stuff that could be requested from some assortment of background check companies by whoever is willing to pay for it. Even the background checks to open a bank account are commonly 50+ pages of information. Whether or not the information is entirely correct (or even for the right person) is a whole other matter. Sure, a company could scrape someone’s tweets or assign probabilities to how likely various accounts and services are owned by that person, but at the end of the day it’s not 100%. Even alerts could come up for news articles mentioning a person of the same name from the same area as the person undergoing the background check, but is a completely different person. Depending on how much someone cares to read the whole report and the analysis versus just look at a few flag icons, that could make a difference. In the end, as long as background check companies can still sell fear and risk, they can live with the tradeoffs of relying on statistical significance determinations to assess people.

underpand 7y ago

How long would the report be if you have your profile privacy on lockdown? ie. all public profiles are private and you don't reuse usernames Are they able to do more nefarious things like use fingerprint/IP/device history to connect random accounts together?

dylan604 7y ago
Or just ask Facebook about everything they've linked together. Maybe sign up for some sort of FB service, and then create a business model that abuses the access you've been granted to gain the information you're ultimately trying to get. If questioned about it, just blame some rouge employee as a scapegoat for being a bad apple abusing the trust that FB granted.

0xff00ffee 7y ago

I stopped using my real name on social media in 2016. I wonder if Fama can still associate my posts with my fake names. Because if so, holy shit I'm fucked for dozens of reasons. I guess they could ask Reddit and Hacker News for IP logs of user ip addresses, especially since HN doesn't delete accounts.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Yeah, you shouldn't count on it. Especially if they use neural networks - they likely have the know-how to identify you using your writing patterns (though the needle in the haystack issue might help you against not really persistent detectives...)
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  "Especially if they use neural networks" LOL.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    "LOL" as in "heh, like they have the know-how to use them properly !" or as in "duh, of course they do!" ?
    - p0sixlang 7y ago
      I think that was a LOL as in "your comment lacks understanding of the capabilities of neural networks in it's suggestion a neural network could identify someone in the pool of... everyone (lets even say in a certain area), based on writing style." You'd need countless IDed writing samples to even give yourself a 50% chance of making a network able to with 50% accuracy match an unIDed writing sample to an IDed one. Facial recognition is easier (yet still very hard) to implement because there're characteristics about people's faces that're hard to modify unless you're really trying. Compared to writing style which could differ based on too many factors.
      - 7y ago

istorical 7y ago

How do they handle extremely common names?

drdeadringer 7y ago
The name doesn't even need to be common. There are a dozen's dozen ways to spell my last name, and I've received emails intended for somebody else simply because the sender searched the directory and clicked the first hit they got. For extra credit, I share the same name [spelling and all] with a decently famous musician. If you search for me you'll get him unless you include//exclude an extra choice word or two.
- JakeStone 7y ago
  There was nothing wrong with your name until you were about 12 years old?
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    Specifically for the music artist, there was nothing wrong until my mid-to-late 30s. Both myself and the musician artist in question are similar in age. Regarding common mis-spelling, that has been as issue for decades. It is a regular deal of "that's an 'e', not a 'o'".

jocoda 7y ago

Did you have to pay for the background check? A lot of asset management companies require regular background checks from their service providers and the service providers have to foot the bill. Always wondered if there was some kind of kick back going on that motivated the frequency or if it was a legal requirement.

nickthemagicman 7y ago

What ever happened to anayomous message boards like 4chan? We demonize those people but they're the ones not letting their freedom of expression be repressed by future job prospects?

anon_cow1111 7y ago
From what I can tell, 4chan went downhill after smartphones became the norm, then very fast after 2015-16. If you're asking 'how could it go downhill any more than it was?' that means most of the hobbyists and content creators left. Most of the popular boards seem to be spam or copypasta threads only vaguely related to the board subject. 8chan was taken down after some mass shooters posted there but I don't know if it's gone permanently or just went to an onion server.

xwowsersx 7y ago

Fuck Fama and fuck any company using them. If you're a candidate and a company asks you to submit to one of these, just save them the time and write a giant fuck you on a piece of paper and hand it to them.

s45 7y ago
Nah don't do that. Just ghost them like so many companies do to candidates.

Waterluvian 7y ago

That's wild. I got my first ever background check to volunteer at a high school. The report was three checkboxes indicating "we found nothing wrong"

t0astbread 7y ago
A background check before volunteering? Isn't that extremely counterproductive for getting applications?
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Maybe. I work with children and the disabled so that's just how it is. I even had to pay $15. But there hasn't been a shortage of volunteers.
- brewdad 7y ago
  My school district requires all volunteers to undergo a background check renewed every 2 years. I think it's pretty basic, mainly just criminal history. It's really a CYA for the district should anything harmful occur between a student and volunteer.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RijilV 7y ago

In fairness I don’t use social media (well, other than posting here from time to time), so it’s difficult for me to identify with folks who spend a considerable (IMHO) amount of time recording their activities and thoughts on third party systems which have dubious, at best, privacy policies. My naive understanding of these platforms is for you to make yourself discoverable. Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Not sure who the GP is (I'm not dirty myself by going on Twitter just for this), but I assume a lot of people didn't realize at the time (and maybe still don't), that this is the kind of public discourse that does NOT quickly vanish into thin air, and all of the implications that follow?

ravenstine 7y ago

Anyone who appreciates freedom shouldn't lend so much as a thought to a company that tries to do something like this. Get my credit score, call my last employer, do a criminal background check, whatever. But if you scour the internet for any possible kindergarten wrongdoing I've made, goodbye. I'd rather live in a van down by the river.

werber 7y ago

I personally think background checks should just be like, hey are you a violent person, but before any in person interview I’ve been a part of the person has been internet stalked by the whole group and anyone who knows the candidate or someone who does has gotten the tea. I just don’t see any value in this

Jupe 7y ago

Get used to it... this is the world we (the tech community) helped, even pushed, to create. I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it. It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buying a home or even renting an apartment without online services. The cost benefits of leveraging the internet for most operations (help-desk, ordering, even viewing) grossly outweigh the expense of having people perform such duties. The digitization of life is only going to grow, IMO. We, the people, are being (operationally) forced to use the internet for more and more aspects of post-industrial life. For now, our Orwellian dystopia persuades us to use the system. As the "free market" pushes us more and more in the direction of online-only services, AI-driven chat bots and the like, we will reach a point where you must be online to get nearly anything done. Treat every activity you perform on the internet as if it will last forever. Because it will. And people can judge you for it now and forever; even after you've passed on. Most of us have nothing to hide; but this perspective is based on our past experiences. We have nothing to hide if the old rules apply. But these are new rules. I can laugh at an off-color joke in the closeness of friends. Do the same online (via a like, re-tweet, share, whatever) and it becomes part of the permanent BigBrother data store... discover-able, query-able, judge-able forever. Scary stuff.

lonelappde 7y ago
FAANG is full of people who don't actively tweet. G+ was famous for Google execs not using it.
- Jupe 7y ago
  Ok, fair enough, but try and extend the pattern. What if the technical candidates don't have a Facebook account, a twitter account, a github account, or any other active online presence? Do you think such resume's will jump to the top of the decision pile? I highly doubt it.
  - Balgair 7y ago

antibland 7y ago

In the Twitter thread (regarding Fama): > You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf.

meow_mix 7y ago

Of course, this stock photo looking guy started the company https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mones-45740a2a/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mones-45740a2a/

gruez 7y ago

Whatever happened to the 90s where the prevailing advice was that the internet was a dangerous place, and you should always used pseudonyms?

lonelappde 7y ago
Adtech happened. Deanonymized people are more exploitable.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Adtech didn’t deanonymize people, just exploited them after everyone willingly did that themselves, chasing internet fame under real identities.
mnm1 7y ago
Facebook obviously.

frgotmylogin 7y ago

I wonder how long it will be before someone competent starts doing this and including deanonymized data from places like HN, Reddit, Twitter accounts without your real name attached, phone location, etc.

jlgaddis 7y ago
What makes you believe there aren't already dozens of companies working on exactly this?
- frgotmylogin 7y ago
  Ha, absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are people working on it, not sure if they are in the pre-employment job screening space.

djhworld 7y ago

Does this include retweets? I'm mostly a passive twitter user who mostly likes/retweets tweets that pique my interest. I wonder if these companies evaluate what sort of things you are liking/endorsing and associating that with your character...

aeyes 7y ago
This has all tweets the person has liked that their algorithm flags as bad. Not just their own tweets.

wolco 7y ago

Maybe I'm not understanding. How would the company know the twitter account? Could you give them someone elses twitter account? Why did author give twitter account and get surprised when they have a report based on it?

astura 7y ago
My guess is they have an agreement with twitter where they provide the email address and twitter will tell you the account id. They would have the candidate's email address from their job application.

adrianmonk 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out I remember back in the 1980s when large numbers of regular folks were trying to come to grips with the question, "What the hell actually is a computer, anyway?". This phrase (GIGO) had to be repeated constantly. People had all these wild ideas that computers were just magic and could turn nothing into something. And that whatever information came out of a computer, it can't be wrong, because computers don't make mistakes. After a while, it seemed to catch on and penetrate into the collective consciousness. People would even repeat "Garbage In, Garbage Out!" or "GIGO!" with delight, proud that they'd learned something about computers. Anyway (finally) my point: it seems like we've regressed. GIGO wasn't common sense, and then it was, and now... it's not again? It feels like computer literacy is moving backward a bit.

t0astbread 7y ago

If a company asks me to do a background check during application I will just instantly abort. Like ok, if they don't trust me that I'm not an asshole how can I trust them that they treat me right?

p0sixlang 7y ago
What about post-offer?

cabaalis 7y ago

It seems against the grain on this board, but people actually think airing all their little annoyances publicly online is a good idea that will never affect their actual lives?

granshaw 7y ago
You’re missing the point. This is a bad algorithm that is in effect nothing but false positives, and not even on his posts, but on posts he _liked_ Do you want to live in a world where you don’t dare to do or say _anything_ online that can be traced back to you, cause now you even have to factor in shitty algorithms like these? I sure don’t.
- cabaalis 7y ago
  I don't think I did. There are misses due to bad algorithm. And yet some of the tweets highlighted are indicative of a highly toxic mindset. I do want to live in a world where statements akin to "shut up you f'ing boomer" can be tied to the person who holds or appreciates that value.
- brewdad 7y ago
  Exactly. I tend to browse Twitter on my phone. Judging by the number of times I've accidentally clicked on a tweet while scrolling, I'm sure I've accidentally "liked" more than a few tweets that I find abhorrent. I'd hate to think that such mis-touches would harm me personally or professionally.

WalterBright 7y ago

I seriously doubt that punishing people for their opinions is going to change any minds. Totalitarian countries tried that for decades, with severe punishments. All it did was cause people to hide their opinions, and have a fake society with fake consensus that everyone knew was fake.

harrisonjackson 7y ago

Let's put aside the absurd conclusion that you can actually assess job fit and performance based on twitter engagement... you could scroll their feed for 5 minutes and have a more accurate feel for their attitude, humor, and public persona than this keyword matching. If you HAVE to go this route...as an employer I'd rather see something like Github's contributions by DateTime showing me when they are most active on social media lol. Ah 200 posts every Monday at 2PM, eh? Interesting.

leftyted 7y ago

I clicked on their twitter and I'd think twice before hiring them unless the interview went really well.

Jenz 7y ago

So, if you're not on Twitter...

drngdds 7y ago

The main thing I'm getting from this is that Twitter is terrible. Why do likes have to be public? Why can't you choose to make some tweets followers-only? Those two things would cripple this kind of background check. (Mastodon has both of those, but a social network is only as good as its userbase, and Mastodon's is small and niche.)

Keverw 7y ago

I think it's insane schools and companies are monitoring peoples social media, should keep work and personal separate. For example went viral that a Christian school very recently expelled a girl because she had a rainbow cake that they seen in a photo on social media, and then heard some kid got in trouble for going to a gun range with his dad over the weekend and posting about having a fun day. Then there was another case with a college student. Looks like many of these schools are currently being sued too, but recent developments. I think trying to control personal social media is over reaching. Not sure if companies get sued over this, but since many schools are government ran they are opening up a can of worms relating being subjected to section 1983 civil rights lawsuits. Plus schools keep cutting stuff due to funding, like one of the elementary schools nearby cut both art and music completely so I think they should tread carefully if they are going to start monitoring student's social media since they can't afford to be sued. One of those schools thought is a private school, so not sure how far that lawsuit would go since many states it's legal to discriminate against LGBT since not as protected like race is, you can get married on the weekend and be fired on Monday.

mikedilger 7y ago

The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

bsanr2 7y ago
I'm not sure where this comes from. Any halfway-competent company in a right-to-work state can drop you like a sack of potatoes with no cause or notice, and you won't be able to do anything unless you have a documented history of them doing something stupidly, obviously discriminatory.
- mikedilger 7y ago
  It's coming from California. Sorry, that's my only experience.
astura 7y ago
Definitely not true in America, most low skill jobs I've worked about 40%+ of employees ended up fired. Most for "just not working out" rather than blatant insubordination.
- mikedilger 7y ago
  California is different than the rest of America, and that's where my experience is from. Sun paid me out 6 months severence pay... it didn't seem fair to them. While working there it took about 6 months of intermittant dedicated effort for our manager to fire one of our co-workers. In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.
  - astura 7y ago
    Well that doesn't mean that it's California law that's the problem (California is an “at-will” state like the vast majority of states), but Sun's policies. Usually corporate policies only pays out severance for layoffs, not firings for poor performance, and severance is hardly required under California law. A lot of white collar employers will usually try to work with poor performers to improve performance, but that's definitely not a given. >In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. This is extremely common in America too, it's called a "probationary period." My husband didn't even get any benefits during the six month probationary period at his last job. There's also "contract to hire," which is, again, not uncommon in America. The new employee is employed by an external company for a set period of time and the employer can decide to hire him or her (or not) when the contract ends. Internships are also used as a "try before you buy." Some employers mostly hire former interns for junior positions, that way they already know their skills and work ethic. I worked at two such companies where the vast majority of juniors were former interns.

wespiser_2018 7y ago

I've built a very similar algorithm and website for a class I was taking a few years ago, however, we never considered monetizing it like this: https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems. - Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist. - The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language. - There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users. At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!

iamleppert 7y ago

Startup idea: A service that seeds the Internet with only a fake, G-rated version of yourself that shows you liking pictures of kittens, automatically posting inspirational quotes, completely politically correct.

1290cc 7y ago

So its the equivalent of a credit check but focused on how you conduct yourself online. I'm okay with this only if its law that the report details are shared with the applicant. The odds of mistaken identity are too high with an automated service.