John Sumser's series on information security raises the question of whether the recruiting industry contributes to identity theft and other social ills:
Like incriminating information left on MySpace, most job hunters have no idea what risks they expose themselves to when they send out a resume. Identity theft is an insidious thing. It results in clogged email boxes and spam filters long before it causes a bank account drain. The impact is slow and hard to relate to the actual sending of a resume.
It's not that I don't care about security, but framing the question this way feels a little like blaming Sony for a a break-in because they make televisions that people want to steal. If I go to the bank and say my name is Jack Welch and ask to withdraw $10,000, and the bank gives it to me, that's not Jack Welch's fault. If they ask me what my last job was, and I say, "CEO of General Electric," it's also not Jack's fault. If I apply for a credit card from MBNA, write "Jack Welch" on the application, and they let me run up $10k in charges, guess what? It's still not Jack Welch's fault.
The data that lives on an average resume has always existed in the realm between that which is considered private or public by law or custom. If you're famous, everyone knows your job title and who you work for. But the same is effectively true if you're a greeter at Wal-Mart. This information has never been private, it's just traditionally been hard to find, and the scarcity of it meant those who had it (e.g. headhunters with a killer Rolodexes) held it very closely.
There are a long list of reasons why we legally protect information like medical records. However, the biggest and best reason to argue for keeping resume data private isn't that a resume contains information that is embarassing, incriminating, or otherwise uniquely privileged*. It's because lenders are allowed to make it my problem to solve when they lend money to someone who says their name is Colin Kingsbury and proves it by giving them a bunch of information anyone can find by Googling my name. Businesses are almost endlessly imaginative when it comes to figuring out how to make money. I live in Boston. If someone opens a credit card account in my name at a Nine West store in Los Angeles and charges $800 of high heels on it, it shouldn't be my responsibility to prove it wasn't me. Put the onus on the lender to know who they're lending to, and you'll see these problems get better, and fast. Resumes should have nothing at all to do with it.
* Resumes can indirectly contain one piece of information that deserves to be considered private: the fact that someone may be looking to leave their current job. This, however, has nothing to do with identity theft.
