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April 28, 2008
Jobs.com Says Profiles Are Permanent
The Consumerist on an unfortunate situation between Jobs.com and someone who has found his information being used elsewhere:
"Dan is pissed because Jobs.com won't remove his name, email address, phone number, and home address from their servers. For reasons unknown, someone else set up a profile with his personal info on Jobs.com. When Dan contacted Jobs.com, they said that because they 'must account for all transactions and account histories' they couldn't delete the info. They also assured him that since he didn't have a resume posted, recruiters can't search or view his information. Dan feels Jobs.com internal 'requirements' shouldn't have any bearing on his right to privacy. What do you think?"
This summary isn't quite in sync with the transcript provided in the entry. It reads a little more clearly if you replace the second sentence with:
"For reasons unknown, someone else set up a profile with his personal info from Jobs.com."
Dan apparently set up a Jobs.com profile at some point, then found that the information he provided there was being put to use elsewhere. Whether by one of Jobs.com's "partners," a ubiquitous out in a lot of privacy policies, or by someone who just came along and scraped the information, is unclear.
Now, Dan's unhappy that his profile is being scraped/reused/whatever, and he wants Jobs.com to take it down. Jobs.com is acting about like Facebook was acting a few months ago, before the New York Times came along and took up the cause.
If Jobs.com truly does have to keep information around in perpetuity, it seems to me that its engineers should figure out how to keep a record in the database while making it unavailable for public consumption. That's the very least Jobs.com can do, and it's still inadequate. "Adequate" would involve a records log that sits independent of the active user database.
The answer for "Dan," however, is one Consumerist readers have already suggested: He needs to overwrite his profile with information that effectively decouples his profile from his personal identity. Even if he can't completely z out the profile, he can make it less harmful to his privacy.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 2:52 PM | Add Comment
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