Personal Information Security II
(September 5, 2007)
Here's the opening salvo:
The
Monster Burglary continues to impact innocent jobseekers and
(non-jobseekers) everywhere. My wife forwarded me the e-mail
below. Mind you, she has never used
Monster.com.
She did, several year back, use
FedJobs to see
what was available in the federal public sector. She did not know
that FedJobs was affiliated (or powered) by Monster. No one
informed her of that. (Recruiting
Nevada)
The header of this blog (Recruiting
Nevada) proclaims that the proprietor is the publisher of "Nevada's
Largest Network of Employment Websites." So, it comes as no real
surprise that the stance is decidedly anti-monster. After all, Monster
is their day to day competition for both candidates and customers.
The degree to which the competition has
used this moment to lambaste Monster is pretty amazing. That said,
read
Monster Burglary and
Monster Burglary (response) by the same author. While the focus is
on Monster, the back story is clear.
Job Boards with resume databases will
always have variations of the troubles Monster encountered this summer.
Selling resume databases implies a criminal problem with access by
"hackers" or misuse of the data by paying customers. While it is
possible to minimize the risk, it is impossible to eliminate it.
What's really interesting here is the
shift from blogging as an information tool to blogging as a propaganda
arm. In the article about his wife's email experiences, Doug Geinzer
(who I believe writes the blog) manages to simultaneously quote his
Nevada connections (wife was a District Attorney) while bashing Monster
for failing to disclose that they powered the FedJobs website. It's
brilliant and effective marketing.
You'd have to guess that Nevada is home
to a number of operations who use ads for non-existent jobs to troll for
personal information. It would be very interesting to hear
Recruiting Nevada's
approach to screening out that form of phishing. Just how do they verify
that an opening actually exists? Is that form of job ad just another way
to do what the "hackers" did at Monster?
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