Hacker News Reader

Comment by OGinparadise | Hacker News Reader

Not sure making everything accessible via a Google search is liberating. People should have a right to move on, not have everything they did or said a few decades ago in depositions, lawsuits, bankruptcy, divorce or whatever on top of a Google search. Imagine your prospective employer searching for "your name" and reading what your ex-wife, landlord...said about you in a court case.

View on HN

You know what I would do if I was googling a potential employee and came across divorce documents?

Hit the back button.

Not out of some respect of privacy, but because reading that seems like an extremely boring waste of my time. Maybe I'm weird like that.

I don't like pepper, but I don't expect the pepper industry to disappear overnight.

Or in other words, I don't know why your personal experience is relevant to the parent comment, there's entire entertainment industries that are funded by gossip and gossip alone so obviously there are people out there who would care about that kind of thing.

Yeah, people dig celebrity gossip, but does it follow that HR is going to be interested in Joe Smoes divorce five years ago? I don't think so, particularly when they are looking at dozens of Joes a day. It would be a waste of their time to read that stuff, and boring to boot.

Sure, someone out there will probably do it, but I just can't wrap my mind around this becoming a pandemic.

HR isn't the concern. If it's public, anyone who gives a shit about that kind of stuff can find it, usually with just a simple focused Google search.

It used to be that you had to hire a private detective to find dirt on people... I get that Google is going to make that easier but we don't have to go out of our way to help that along. :)

Can't you just pay 10 cents per page for this stuff right now? I don't think using a suboptimal non-google search should present that much of a hardship. I don't really see this being a game changer for someone who just wants to smear a particular person; only if you need a very large amount of documents (in other words, are using it for its intended purpose.)

The difference between "free" and 10 cents is quite stark. That's the famous problem holding back microtransactions in general.

So what about when Joe's colleagues circulate his divorce case details around for a laugh or, worse, to character smear the guy to damage a promotion or gain political points in the workplace?

It seems like you'd be opening yourself up to a lot of potential discrimination claims if you made a habit of reading potential hiree divorce records.

Absolutely. It is probably a decent idea to have a company policy on record that HR should never look at that sort of thing. All sorts of information that can indicate things which are protected classes could be found in those documents.

Depending on what state you live in it would be your lucky day if a perspective employer went through divorce records and decided not to hire you (many states have marital status as a protected class).

If you're head set on opening yourself up to discrimination lawsuits, PACER is available now. In addition to the 10¢ a page, I recommend saving up a bundle for the employment attorney you'll need to retain.

I used that as an example. Discrimination lawsuits might be feasible against big companies but smaller ones might look and not hire you by giving you a bogus reason, or no reason. Even if someone sues them 4 years later, your rent is due by the 5th of next month.

They are many other things one did 10-30 years ago that can stop someone from getting a job (minor criminal convictions, college pranks, marijuana arrests etc etc)

Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision.

Maybe they would be able to make a better hiring decision.

Of course, especially when almost anyone can say anything, unchallenged, in a court filing "He was emotionally abusive" or the "he was a very messy person."

But fear not, soon enough everyone will be part of the system, one way or another.

They could do the same thing in a blog post; they could even get the blog post notarized if they wanted to.

Yes and no. For example during divorce they are trying to convince a judge and by extension get a lot more money, custody etc etc. So, the incentives to lie and dramatize things are much higher, for most people, during the divorce (or civil suit or...) case.

And what would blind employers to that incentive? There is also a counter-incentive known as perjury.

Should we ban blogs because they allow for anonymous accusations that someone's employer might see?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com