Privacy Group Alleges Monster-ous Breach

The privacy practices of online job search site Monster.com came into question last week after a report published by the Privacy Foundation, a nonprofit agency, alleged that the company doesn't sufficiently disclose what it does with job seekers' resumés after they've been posted to the Monster.com site.

The report's author, Pam Dixon, a research fellow with the foundation, says the site shares resumé data and online behavior information with partner AOL Time Warner, and that resumés job seekers post directly to the sites of Monster clients are also stored on Monster without their knowledge. The report also says that a form for college students requires completion of fields pertaining to gender and ethnic origins. "Monster.com does have some egregious practices that aren't duplicated in the market," she says.

According to Dixon, Monster sends resumé ID numbers to AOL that make it possible to tie data to individual job seekers. She also says that she posted dummy resumés on the sites of some Monster clients--including Blockbuster Entertainment, Boeing, and H&R Block--and the resumés were available moments later on the Monster site, without her consent. She says all the issues can be easily addressed if Monster changes the way it collects and uses data.

Monster CEO Jeff Taylor takes issue with the report, noting that the site doesn't send personal data to AOL; resumés stored on its servers on behalf of clients are accessible only to the job seeker and the company in question (although he acknowledges that about half of those companies don't tell job seekers that they have ties to Monster); and the questions about gender and ethnic origins posed to college students are "opt-in." "There is actually no privacy breach at all," Taylor says. "What's sad is that we have to get into a debate about terminology."

But Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters Corp., a consumer privacy group, contends that Monster should be especially vigilant about privacy. "What's scary about job sites is that people are desperate to provide contact information and very extensive personal information," he says. "There's tremendous opportunity for abuse."

Meanwhile, Monster this week will introduce a new online training division aimed at its 11.2 million registered users. MonsterLearning.com, an online training search engine, aggregates 10,000 online and offline courses on subjects from accounting to programming. The vendor plans to release learning-management system software for midsize companies early next year.