Employee screening turns into constant scrutiny
Lifestyles monitored after hiring, as risks loom for civil liberties
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/754395.html
By Samantha Maziarz Christmann
News Business Reporter
In the Orwellian world of surveillance and screening, the tried-and-true background check may be falling out of fashion.Today, employers look for drug references on Facebook, lapses in a worker's mortgage payments or evidence that a manager is frequenting the local casino.
These employee screening tools, many geared toward monitoring lifestyles, are part of a new batch of nontraditional services and products offered by a Buffalo security company.
"We can develop an early warning system to prevent problems before they develop," said Anthony N. Diina, president of Metrodata Services.
Metrodata is part of a new trend in corporate security, a movement beyond the traditional credit and criminal background screens that employers use when evaluating applicants for hire or promotion.
More and more, the emphasis is on lifestyle-monitoring services that keep a constant watch over employee driving records, financial habits and social networking activity long after they have been hired.
While Diina sees continuous surveillance of workers as protection for both employee and employer, critics see it as another erosion of personal liberties.
"This is just another way to strip employees of their privacy legally," said John A. Curr III, regional director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Though companies are required to get employee consent before conducting searches, Curr said, the desperate state of the economy leaves workers reluctant to say no.
And even if they do, not cooperating can lead employers to suspect that employees have something to hide.
"It's very tough to be courageous and stick to your principles when you have a family to feed," Curr said.
Depending on whom you ask, sustained employee scrutiny can either be a welcome tool for vulnerable employers or a shocking new level of privacy invasion.
"Sometimes these things are treatable," Diina said of the personal problems his company can uncover. "Employers can identify problems in time to intervene, recommend counseling and save both the employee and the company a lot of embarrassment and risk."
By watching such records, employers can glean telling information and flag behavior that could spell trouble down the road.
Uncharacteristic lifestyle changes, such as increased trips to the casino, may mean that a bank teller could be tempted to skim the till.
A reference to drug use on a Facebook page may suggest an addiction or behavior that could put a company's reputation at risk.
Maybe so, Curr says, but the cost is too high.
Instead of trying to predict employees' behavior, companies are better off judging a worker by the ethic that he or she has already demonstrated, as well as evaluating productivity and past performance, he said.
The problem with that, experts counter, is that crimes such as internal theft are often committed by trusted employees.
Just last month, a Catholic priest confessed to stealing more than $200,000 over a period of years from his church in Cheektowaga.
In another case, a Niagara Falls man was convicted of stealing more than $50,000 from a youth athletic league.
Even security experts are quick to caution about the use of new technology, including informational databases that provide much of the profiling information used by employers and their consultants.
A single red flag should never be evaluated on its own, said David D'Amato, owner of Buffalo Security in Amherst. Rather, it should be seen as one piece of a larger puzzle.
"You have to use common sense," D'Amato said of the need to evaluate a person's entire background.
Tamar Blewitt, a property manager for Kissling Interests in Buffalo, said she uses credit and criminal information from Metrodata to flesh out a larger picture when screening tenants for the company's more than 800 properties.
Coupled with a tenant's rental history, such information has served her company well, she said, successfully predicting troubled tenants.
"Nowadays you have to be very careful," she said. "Especially for us. These are people who are actually going to be living here. You want to make sure, for everybody's sake, that you have a high-caliber tenant."
In some cases, especially in the hiring of senior management, employers also have to balance privacy rights with their responsibility to protect the company's interests.
"It should be noted that managers of a business are fiduciaries and, as such, they owe certain duties to the owners of the business that employs them," said Arlene M. Hibschweiler, an adjunct associate professor of accounting and law at the University at Buffalo.
Citing the legal obligation of managers to adhere to a standard of reasonably prudent care in the workplace, she said employers must protect their company and its other employees.
"Failing to properly investigate a candidate being considered for a sensitive financial position may represent a breach of that duty, creating potential liability for the manager who did not do a sufficient examination," she said.
In fact, in a pamphlet advertising its own employee behavior-predicting personality tests, security company ADP plays up the potential for legal action due to negligent hiring and retention. It points out past cases in which companies have been held liable for employee misconduct, costing them millions of dollars.
Curr dissents. "They cannot point to a single study to show these [methods] can predict employee behavior," he said.
Still, while experts acknowledged that the practice is not perfect, investigators are required by law to show that their methods are statistically valid.
"You can predict whether someone is inclined to a certain type of behavior," D'Amato said.
Under current legislation, employee profiling is legal, but any information obtained by an outside consumer-reporting agency is subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
If an employer takes an adverse action because of information uncovered by a third party, it is required to notify the employee and give him or her an opportunity to dispute it.
Still, some wonder where such surveillance will end, especially as security companies begin marketing their services to private individuals.
Buffalo Security has begun marketing GPS devices to parents who want to monitor their children's driving speeds, and Metrodata promises to tell you everything you want to know about "that neighbor who keeps looking at you over the fence."
All for as low as $18.
"I'm very much a fan of individual rights," Diina said, "but it's hard to imagine how we should take public information and just pretend it doesn't exist when you're making an evaluation of someone."
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the New World.
Who would have thought that peoples Facebook and Myspace would be used as a weapon against them.
I'm Shocked, SHOCKED! that this is happening.
One embarassing indiscretion and "Biff" is marked for life.
How can people say they're concerned about privacy rights when they volunteer candid personal information about themselves to anyone interested.
Orwell was off by 30 or 40 years.
Lifestyles monitored after hiring, as risks loom for civil liberties
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/754395.html
By Samantha Maziarz Christmann
News Business Reporter
In the Orwellian world of surveillance and screening, the tried-and-true background check may be falling out of fashion.Today, employers look for drug references on Facebook, lapses in a worker's mortgage payments or evidence that a manager is frequenting the local casino.
These employee screening tools, many geared toward monitoring lifestyles, are part of a new batch of nontraditional services and products offered by a Buffalo security company.
"We can develop an early warning system to prevent problems before they develop," said Anthony N. Diina, president of Metrodata Services.
Metrodata is part of a new trend in corporate security, a movement beyond the traditional credit and criminal background screens that employers use when evaluating applicants for hire or promotion.
More and more, the emphasis is on lifestyle-monitoring services that keep a constant watch over employee driving records, financial habits and social networking activity long after they have been hired.
While Diina sees continuous surveillance of workers as protection for both employee and employer, critics see it as another erosion of personal liberties.
"This is just another way to strip employees of their privacy legally," said John A. Curr III, regional director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Though companies are required to get employee consent before conducting searches, Curr said, the desperate state of the economy leaves workers reluctant to say no.
And even if they do, not cooperating can lead employers to suspect that employees have something to hide.
"It's very tough to be courageous and stick to your principles when you have a family to feed," Curr said.
Depending on whom you ask, sustained employee scrutiny can either be a welcome tool for vulnerable employers or a shocking new level of privacy invasion.
"Sometimes these things are treatable," Diina said of the personal problems his company can uncover. "Employers can identify problems in time to intervene, recommend counseling and save both the employee and the company a lot of embarrassment and risk."
By watching such records, employers can glean telling information and flag behavior that could spell trouble down the road.
Uncharacteristic lifestyle changes, such as increased trips to the casino, may mean that a bank teller could be tempted to skim the till.
A reference to drug use on a Facebook page may suggest an addiction or behavior that could put a company's reputation at risk.
Maybe so, Curr says, but the cost is too high.
Instead of trying to predict employees' behavior, companies are better off judging a worker by the ethic that he or she has already demonstrated, as well as evaluating productivity and past performance, he said.
The problem with that, experts counter, is that crimes such as internal theft are often committed by trusted employees.
Just last month, a Catholic priest confessed to stealing more than $200,000 over a period of years from his church in Cheektowaga.
In another case, a Niagara Falls man was convicted of stealing more than $50,000 from a youth athletic league.
Even security experts are quick to caution about the use of new technology, including informational databases that provide much of the profiling information used by employers and their consultants.
A single red flag should never be evaluated on its own, said David D'Amato, owner of Buffalo Security in Amherst. Rather, it should be seen as one piece of a larger puzzle.
"You have to use common sense," D'Amato said of the need to evaluate a person's entire background.
Tamar Blewitt, a property manager for Kissling Interests in Buffalo, said she uses credit and criminal information from Metrodata to flesh out a larger picture when screening tenants for the company's more than 800 properties.
Coupled with a tenant's rental history, such information has served her company well, she said, successfully predicting troubled tenants.
"Nowadays you have to be very careful," she said. "Especially for us. These are people who are actually going to be living here. You want to make sure, for everybody's sake, that you have a high-caliber tenant."
In some cases, especially in the hiring of senior management, employers also have to balance privacy rights with their responsibility to protect the company's interests.
"It should be noted that managers of a business are fiduciaries and, as such, they owe certain duties to the owners of the business that employs them," said Arlene M. Hibschweiler, an adjunct associate professor of accounting and law at the University at Buffalo.
Citing the legal obligation of managers to adhere to a standard of reasonably prudent care in the workplace, she said employers must protect their company and its other employees.
"Failing to properly investigate a candidate being considered for a sensitive financial position may represent a breach of that duty, creating potential liability for the manager who did not do a sufficient examination," she said.
In fact, in a pamphlet advertising its own employee behavior-predicting personality tests, security company ADP plays up the potential for legal action due to negligent hiring and retention. It points out past cases in which companies have been held liable for employee misconduct, costing them millions of dollars.
Curr dissents. "They cannot point to a single study to show these [methods] can predict employee behavior," he said.
Still, while experts acknowledged that the practice is not perfect, investigators are required by law to show that their methods are statistically valid.
"You can predict whether someone is inclined to a certain type of behavior," D'Amato said.
Under current legislation, employee profiling is legal, but any information obtained by an outside consumer-reporting agency is subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
If an employer takes an adverse action because of information uncovered by a third party, it is required to notify the employee and give him or her an opportunity to dispute it.
Still, some wonder where such surveillance will end, especially as security companies begin marketing their services to private individuals.
Buffalo Security has begun marketing GPS devices to parents who want to monitor their children's driving speeds, and Metrodata promises to tell you everything you want to know about "that neighbor who keeps looking at you over the fence."
All for as low as $18.
"I'm very much a fan of individual rights," Diina said, "but it's hard to imagine how we should take public information and just pretend it doesn't exist when you're making an evaluation of someone."
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the New World.
Who would have thought that peoples Facebook and Myspace would be used as a weapon against them.
I'm Shocked, SHOCKED! that this is happening.
One embarassing indiscretion and "Biff" is marked for life.
How can people say they're concerned about privacy rights when they volunteer candid personal information about themselves to anyone interested.
Orwell was off by 30 or 40 years.
