Posting Yourself Out of a Posting: Using Social Networks to Screen Job Applicants in America and Germany

Abstract

With more than 800 million active users on Facebook alone, the privacy issues raised by social networking sites are becoming increasingly important. Over the past few years, the information that users post to social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter has become the linchpin of a wide variety of legal disputes. As this area of American law is still evolving, the courts have yet to provide a clear answer with regard to the privacy a user of a social network enjoys in an employment relationship, specifically in the pre-employment context. As such, this note seeks to provide a solution for legislators as they consider the effectiveness of current employment and privacy protections in the evolving digital world.