There has
recently been a considerable amount of controversy about employers asking for
job candidates Facebook credentials in order to find out what sort of people
they were, and what sort of things they got up to.
The
critical issue seems to revolve about the distinction between a users public
and private life.
In practice
we may be judged by the company we keep.
This issue is particularly apt because Facebook is primarily a social network,
and unless I am a policeman, and my friends are mostly journalists, it’s not
totally clear that this information is relevant to an employer.
Be that as
it may, David Wiley of Bringham Young University has come up with another scary evaluation metric. How about letting your employer, or your
prospective college, see your search history?
Using “Big Data” tools, this could give either power broker a deep
insight into whom they are potentially entering into a long term relationship
with.
I think,
with a moment’s thought, that this one too comes into the too much information
category, and would fail European data protection legislation on the basis of
informed consent and need to know grounds.
It would also leave a potential employer open to charges of
discrimination, by providing them with information on which to make a discriminatory
decision.
The problem
again comes in because of the umbrella nature of such a request. It grabs
everything, and a lot of it is outside the scope of any possible legitimate use
of the data.
Now how
about if I am asking my students to do research? Suppose I’m asking them to document their web
journey in search of enlightenment on the subject using membranes to provide
high altitude diesel trains with oxygen enriched air for combustion.
In this
case, it could be legitimate, and could provide a valuable anti plagiarism
tool. It shows how long they were on
task, It shows how efficiently they used the web, and it shows how successful
they were while they were doing it.
I could
potentially have a number of target websites which I expected them to find, and
I could evaluate them on a richer metric which could combine time on task with
success in locating information, and a subjective assessment of their search
methodology.
Because the
search could be seen as coursework, and could be limited to a defined time
period, we could avoid the privacy issues, which down check the more general
histories covered above. As for an
employer, I could ask the candidate in advance to provide a transcript of an
hour spent researching the company prior to the interview. This could be an effective test of their
skills and prior knowledge in the field.
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