Office notebook. Recruiters must be very careful in their online searches. If they are today thinking about ways to optimize their quest for the “rare pearl”, or even the “five-legged sheep”, thanks to the new possibilities offered by artificial intelligence (AI), a recent decision of the Court of Cassation reminds them that not all means are good and, first of all, that personal data only belongs to their owner.
A ruling from the Court of Cassation on April 30 has just overturned the appeal of the conviction of a detective to one year in prison and a fine of 20,000 euros for having collected personal data free of access to the Internet, but in an unfair manner.
This judgment is the latest episode in the so-called “espionage of Ikea employees” affair, which resulted, in 2021, in a fine of 1 million euros for the French subsidiary of the company. Swedish furniture and prison sentences for thirteen of its leaders. The brand then set up, in several of its stores, a survey system for its employees and job candidates in the 2000s and then in the 2010s.
In his appeal proceedings, the accused detective defended his character “disloyal” of the collection of personal data, since in response to the request of the sponsoring company, he had identified “information made public through the press or information publicly disseminated by a person on a social network (open source data)”.
“Without the knowledge of the people concerned”
His searches concerned information such as criminal records, banking and telephone information, vehicles, properties, status as tenant or owner, marital status, health, travel abroad. Profiling that went well beyond the information usually exchanged during a job interview.
However, Googling a future recruit is not prohibited, but the transmission of their information to the human resources manager is precisely regulated and the data must be “collected and processed in a fair and lawful manner”precise the IT law and freedoms. It is on this point that the Court of Cassation ruled, which qualified the means of collection as “unfair in employer-employee relations”.
All the employees’ information certainly came from public sites, such as websites, directories, discussion forums, social networks, regional press sites, as the defendant himself explained during his interrogations. , but they “were used unrelated to the purpose of their posting online and were collected without the knowledge of the persons concerned, thus deprived of the right of opposition established by the Data Protection Act”specifies the ruling of April 30.
You have 10.03% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.