The Integrity News
Vol. XII No. 31
ISSN 1081-2717
November 20, 2003
"objective risk management services"
You are surely aware of the controversy
surrounding the exporting of U.S. jobs to
cut labor costs.
The popular media addresses this topic from
the point of view of the loss of U.S. jobs to help
the "bottom line".
Our worry has been that some of the countries
receiving the exported work are on the Federal
Government's terrorist watch list !!! We have
been especially concerned about the exporting
of software writing jobs.
Who will be reviewing this new software for
trap doors, time bombs, data diversion
subroutines, and similar sinister inclusions ?
If U.S. businesses do not want to spend the
money to write each line of code, where are
they going to get the labor to check each line ?
We can't do it with automation, because the
technology does not exist to check all the
generated code for planted problems.
What seems incredibly short-sighted, if not
downright stupid, is that some major U.S.
software vendors are having their widely
used wares written in these offshore locations.
Well, if vendors can't check it, and they sell it
to you, or they use it on your behalf to handle
your business, your information protection
could become nonexistent.
NOW, it has come to our attention that under
this same guise of lowering labor costs, one
of our major national consulting firms is
about to conclude a pilot project in which they
are evaluating the screening of resumes in
a low cost foreign country. "If successful,
the project presumably would be extended to
cover the resumes of workers who submit
applications to their U.S. business customers."
It appears that this national consulting firm is
already anticipating flak, in that in their news
release, they quote their law firm as saying that
if U.S. laws are followed, it doesn't matter where
the resumes are screened.
Job applicants are not going to want to have
their personal data beamed halfway around
the world so that it can be inexpensively
evaluated by foreign workers. This will be
wholesale loss of control of their personal
information. Sorry, but while the safeguards
on your personal information in the U.S. leave
a lot to be desired, the Internet and privacy
controls in developing countries are far worse.
Every day, right here in the U.S., we have to
fight the unlicensed companies that are illegally
using stored data for employment purposes in
violation of the FCRA. Workers from halfway
around the world are NOT going to be using
freshly retrieved data as required by U.S. law.
There are so many problems with the foreign
evaluation of resumes that employers now
have a whole new set of very serious questions
to ask the firms to whom they outsource
business operations.
U.S. workers have a whole new set of questions
to ask too. Do they want their entire profile
being laid bare for potential terrorists to use ?
Recall what we covered in
Issue #10, of The Integrity News, on March 17, 2003, entitled
"The Darkest Side of Identity Theft". What
will be the unwitting employer's liability ?
Privacy in the U.S. is tough enough. Wait
until you see what happens to your privacy if
HB 2622, further amending the FCRA, that we
covered in
Issue # 26, of The Integrity News, on
September 19, 2003, becomes law as schemed
by midnight December 31.
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