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> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.

How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?


Please stop thinking about laws, and think about enforcement. If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. We have all sorts of fancy laws on the books that aren't enforced. Environmental regs, animal welfare regs, anti trust laws, white collar anti fraud laws. Data laws fall into this bucket. Nobody that would actually enforce those laws gives a dam. We won't be able to solve any of our problems with new laws, until we can actually enforce the laws already on the books
">* If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. *<"

Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal". I like it! It should be the name of a website, defectolegal.com, for purposes TBD later.

The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto

"Defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect", a flaw, an error.

Don't get me started about "giving a dam".

In English we don’t write commas or periods outside the quotes. The proper way is to write them inside the quotation.

- “defect,” a flaw, an error.

- about giving a dam.”

Don’t get me started about “for purposes TBD later.”

The other person who replied to you noted that this is not true in British English, but beyond that, it appears to me that my generation (Millennials) essentially all came to the same conclusion, which is that punctuation should only be included in the quotation if it's literally part of the text being quoted. (This probably has something to do with the programming mindset.) If you write

>The senator said that the bill was "bloated."

your sentence itself doesn't have a period. In order to give it a period you'd have to write:

>The senator said that the bill was "bloated.".

But then you're saying that the senator described the bill using the (non-)word consisting of the nine characters 'b', 'l', 'o', 'a', 't', 'e', 'd', 'PERIOD'. We've decided that this doesn't make sense.

Your point that this is a generational change is interesting and reminds me of boomers who still write double space after a period.
That’s only the case for American English. British English places periods and commas outside the quotes, unless part of a literal quotation.
There are lots of forms of 'don't care'. Don't care because:

- they have limited resources and they are prioritising something else,

- there is little realistic chance of getting a conviction.

- it's not one of their politically set department targets

- they fundamentally don't think it should be illegal - say historic blasphemy laws still on the books.

Is your main concern resources or enforceability, lack of political focus or some combination of all of the above?

This really has me thinking I ought to just delete my Linkedin. I can't say I've ever got anything out of it except spam and fomo. I don't even like to keep it up-to-date because someone is just ripping that information off.
I believe a LinkedIn profile is mandatory to apply to YC. I could assume you might not be interested in applying to YC, but it’s an interesting fact, and might generalize somewhat for many other applications.
I think that is a mutually beneficial signal probably.
FWIW - I deleted my linkedin about a year ago and I've received more spam since I deleted it than when it was active.
Follow the money, easy payouts for cops and courts is where 95% of enforcement goes. Drug possession is an instant $1000 profit for the local law enforcement, and possibly much more. And if they are poor and challenge it, the extra court fees and court lawyer are also profitable.

Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.

">If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal.<"

Ahhhh! A new English expression, "defecto legal". I like it! It could be the name of a popular website.

The proper term is "de facto": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto

A defect is a flaw, an error, and "defecto" is Spanish for the English "defect". The meaning of "defecto legal" (English) thus remains in the wind, TBD. But I look forward to it's landing.

s/it's/its/g

You want the possessive ("its"), not the shortened form ("it is") which would make that sentence:

"...look forward to it is landing"

Thank you for sharing the Spanish interpretation, TIL :)

I believe it actually is illegal, via a set of more general rules on data collection, on what constitutes a fraud, etc. May not be spelled out exactly like this specific use case, but still very likely covered by law. Just difficult to prove.
I saw this post on reddit where some sketchy AI company (Alpheva AI) is posting jobs and requesting a screenshot of all applicants having left their app a 5-star review in the app store as part of the application process:

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1pp0iej/thi...

This is another thing were it clearly is illegal, but good luck actually trying to sue or get them to stop it. Worst case scenario they'll set up another cheap company on paper, and keep doing the same scam
It certainly would be illegal in Europe under the GDPR - data collected for one purpose (handling of applications) cannot be used for another without explicit, informed consent.
It may be illegal, but shady stuff certainly happens in EU too.

Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.

Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.

Oh, I agree that illegal stuff happens in the EU aplenty. The question was whether this is illegal and it almost certainly is. Job postings from recruiters - while morally reprehensible - may just skirt the law, but straight up using applications for profile building, marketing and other purposes almost certainly isn’t permitted
Im sure it isnt that hard to get candidates to tick another check box that says the data can be used for other stuff.
The box would need to be off by default and clearly state the purpose. It would at least be possible to verify it exists and no example has been shown.
”We and our 972 partners…”
Corporations are people, and very promiscuous ones at that.
Don't ignore free speech of job search applicants .!
I think there’s a good chunk of the SF tech event scene built around pulling in qualified email addresses, too. “Apply to attend”
Because some animals are more equal than others and the government has decided that companies are not only citizens but the more equal group.

Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.

It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio

Citizens United, a monumental betrayal of every citizen.
> The provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 restricting unions, corporations, and profitable organizations from independent political spending and prohibiting the broadcasting of political media funded by them within sixty days of general elections or thirty days of primary elections violate the freedom of speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.

I'm sure we're on the same side, but I want to point out that that case didn't make a huge difference. By that I mean it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections, most of the "money is speech, super pacs can do anything at all" stuff was already legal.

Right, but if you try to make a gentle, common-sense, broad consensus law and the Supreme Court squashes it as violating the constitution, that also prevents any potential future more stringent regulation.
> it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections,

Propaganda works, and this was a BIG change, as it now let unlimited shady corpo money spam agit-prop with no consequence.

this was step 1 on living in a post-truth world.

While this is true, the first such betrayal came in 1976, with Buckley v Valeo.

This was (AIUI) the US Supreme Court decision that established the precedent that money counts as protected speech.

So much of the rot that has occurred since then can be traced back to this.

To add onto this, the single exception I am aware of to this rule is the result of the gas explosions in Massachusetts.

In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiSource#Massachusetts_gas_lin...

You do realize that the decisions at the corporations are made by people. You may try to draw a distinction between people and corporations, but in the end it was some person who decided to ghost someone.
You do realize that the people making those decisions at corporations are largely shielded from the liability of said decisions, and that when companies are treated like citizens they almost never get equivalent punishment like human beings do.

I can draw a distinction between people and corporations because it’s literally encoded in the fucking law.

I actually don’t know how or why you would imply that such a distinction doesn’t exist.

I swear to god a couple of the interviews I have been in lately have felt more like free consultations rather than me applying for a job.
Its straight up wire fraud.
It's technically fraud, but there aren't any damages.
This seems analogous to the following. A company asks users to fill out an online survey in exchange for participation in some raffle, except the company never pays out any prize. As with the job application there was never a guaranteed reward, but it's still easy to see the damage. The company induced to you to provide them with an economically valuable asset (filled out survey/application) for which you expected a fair chance at a reward. It seems plausible that you could claim damages at least up to the expected value.
Except a job offer is generally non binding, so they could interview you, offer the job, then withdraw it.

So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.

>So never being offered a job because it doesn't exist doesn't lose you anything.

Ah well look, if the job posting was just to collect resumes with zero intention to actually hire, you did lose some things:

- actual time spent applying to a job that was never open - emotional damage on focus to try to get this job - loss of free market value of your data (company profited from this data, when you could have profited from it) - damages for acquisition of your personal data under a fraudulent basis (when otherwise, maybe you did not want your data shared)

Spotted the HR worker posting ghost jobs
In the UK at least Fraud doesn't require any damages, just an intent to gain something of value on the criminals side.
Your time might be worthless but mine isn't.
Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.
But this is part of the problem with crimes and enforcement in the modern age: sure, I might have only wasted a few minutes of my time. But I'm just one of hundreds or thousands of people who were tricked into wasting that time, by this one act.

Multiply this across all the fraudulent job postings, and it really starts to add up.

It's clear (to me, at least) that we need better laws to handle this sort of wide-but-shallow attack on people. It's analogous to spam.

I recently learned of [1], which is a good example of "too small for me to sue" but still worth going through it collectively.

1: https://www.canadianbreadsettlement.ca/

> Yeah, you go ahead and sue someone for the few minutes of your time it took to send in a application for a fake job. Then you'll really see what wasting time looks like.

1. That is exactly what class actions are for, because small damages multiplied by many people are big damages.

2. That's also why we need punitive damages, so someone can't get away with unlawful actions by deliberately coasting along under the threshold where it makes sense to sue. For instance, IIRC, you can collect something like $5000 from someone who doesn't put you on their "do not call list" when requested. That amount has nothing to do with the value of the "few minutes of your time it took to" answer a telemarketing call.

You are missing a point. The only thing it really does is force people to pursue other forms as online channel is too polluted for anyone with sense/options/skill ( or all of the above ). So it leaves desperate, optionless, those without skills and everyone else who fell through the cracks. Another system undermined for no clear benefit. It does not benefit the employer. It does not benefit the employee. It does benefit some data brokers.. and only then for a bit until the rest of the market catches up..

But was it worth it?

America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.

It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)

Exactly - no national, general data protection law. Although the California one looks pretty similar to the GDPR from the summary, it's not truly national.
it is de facto national because California has the most people and is insanely wealthy; there is no F500 company handling broad consumer data that does not have a presence or customers there.

there have already been CCPA enforcements against companies like Tractor Supply, Sephora, Honda, and Google (tho the GOOG was more of a "violated a lot of stuff including CCPA").

It doesn't have enough teeth to scare FAANGs, who have the money and technical ability to do whatever, but it can definitely keep companies in line.

source: did CCPA compliance and security at multiple F500

Even if there was, under the current regime, the probability of it being enforced is near-zero, especially if you are in the good graces of the child king.
The problem of enforcement doesn't fall only on the executive branch. They're tasked with executing laws passed by congress. Congress is ultimately a check on the executive, and if they care to have their laws enforced they do have actions they could take.
"healthcare, video rental records" wait what? One of these things, etc. Curious how that came to be? Is it like special rules for (IIRC) onions in finance?
Someone leaked some politician’s video rental history back in the day (there wasn’t even anything controversial): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

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