Comment by tomtimtall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomtimtall | Hacker News Reader

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> The point of privacy laws are that your consent is required, and taking things from you under duress or coercion is not consent.

This seems like your taking it a bit to the extreme. We both agree that for me to hire you to do a job I’m allowed to know who you are right? And that to identify the one person out of the world population I am allowed to keep a record with enough details that I can identify if a person is in fact you, right? Now if my bookeping of people changes from “roughly visually resembles the same person” which we both agree is a rubbish measure if any kind of security is involved to “has known fingerprint” and you refuse to comply, why then should I not be allowed to fire the person who I can no-longer identify out of the world population?

You have complete freedom to not want people to see your face or know your fingerprint, but you just cannot take away the freedom of a potential employer to be able to identify who you are by the means they decide.

In most states in the United States, the notion of consent in the employment context is very different than, say, European privacy law. In European law, consent from an employee is almost impossible to obtain for any significant decision because of the inherent power imbalance in an employment relationship.

However, in the United States, where most employees are employed "at will," deciding to remain an employee is often considered to be consent. The law considers that you have choice: you choose to work there and consent, or you chose to not work there.

In this story, it appears that there is a separate law considering religious freedom and not privacy that requires employers to make some accommodations when not too burdensome.

This, alone, is not the full picture. It's trivially easy to get into utter absurdity. What if an employer decides they can only identify people by surgically grafting special ID cards to their foreheads?

There is - obviously - more at play here than simply the right of the employer to identify employees by any means they wish. There is some level of reasonableness here as well.

This moves the argument into murkier grounds, as now we have to figure out how reasonable fingerprints are in any given situation.

If they decide that, then you don't have an inherent right to work there. You're allowed to quit.

It's similar to how people who are unwilling to dispense reproductive care or contraceptives have many career options available to them - but no inherent right to be pharmacists or doctors.

This seems patently ridiculous. How can there be no limits just because a perspective employee can theoretically refuse?

What if all the companies decided to have these requirements?

There's an inherent power imbalance here that isn't so simple as dismissing any issues simply because there is no literal gun being held to the head at the moment of decision.

And I'll assume even you have limits somewhere. For example, predicating employment for a cushy remote via snail-mail job on a specific person happening to die... Eventually you just get to the most threadbare excuses for soliciting illegal activity.

You don't have a right to work anywhere specific, but you do have a right as an employee that a big list of things cannot be required by your employer.

You're just arguing against the idea of employment laws as a concept. Where do you draw the line? I would have assumed "Employers don't have a right to require physical mutilation" would have been a universal belief, but apparently not.

That a completely different and silly argument. Should an employer be allowed to raise an employees wage? Yes, sure.... but no, if hey are allowed to modify the terms of employment hat must mean they’ve also should have he right to steal employees first borne!!?

You trying to argue against fingerprinting, a identification practice so damn common that’s almost everyone currently has a device in their pocket using it, by saying “but what if they then adopt something completely unacceptable!!?” That’s not an argument against the simple known technology, it’s just an absurd slippery sloop argument where you pretend everything is one giant variation of similar actions an therefore nothing must ever change for fear that this could mean over negative changes could come.

I was trying to use an absurd example to point out that it's not unreasonable to set some limits on what an employer can ask of a (possibly potential) employee.

I was not commenting on what those limits are or should be. I was only pointing out that they exist.

I don't understand how this relates to your own example. You seem to be trying to say that a contract is either completely mutable in an unlimited way or else totally immutable? I don't see how that's true at all. There are many limits on contracts already, and yet they still change frequently as situations change.

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