Resumes are a valuable, highly sought-after commodity. Protect your privacy by protecting your resume (or "profile"). Be very choosy about where you leave your resume. It could save the job you have now and in the future. Choosing a Job Site is a section of Job-Hunt that should help you make the best possible web job site choices. The Internet Resume section should help you with your resume.

BBBOnline (Privacy) is a similar service from the Better Business Bureau, which is a much older organization. Again, click on the BBBOnline logo posted on the job site to verify the Web site's participation in the BBB program.

Caution! Since the Monster Board subscribed to BBBOnline/Privacy, the effectiveness of BBBOnline is hazy.

Privacy Policies:

• What information will the Web site collect?
  
  They should indicate the information that they will be collecting, particularly the "individually identifiable information" like your name, address, phone numbers, e-mail address, etc.
  
  
• To whom will the site disclose (or "share") information about you?
  
  It is not uncommon for Web sites to gather and "aggregate" (combine anonymous data) information about their visitors to help them manage their Web site (e.g. which browsers are being used? what monitor resolution dominates? etc.). This information is useful in the aggregate only, and relatively harmless to you personally.
  
  However, you will probably disclose a great deal of "individually identifiable" information (address, education, experience, job level, career goals, etc.) about yourself in the course of applying for a job. That information could be very useful to a third party trying to sell you something. Web sites that have such information can easily find a market where someone wants to purchase it.
  
  If they sell or share such information about you, like your e-mail address or phone numbers, they should disclose that intention in their Privacy Policy. Then, you can decide whether or not that is OK with you (see the paragraph below). If you don't like it, go to another Web site (see Choosing a Job Site for more information).
  
  
• Will they sell the information that they collect?
  
  If you don't like to receive unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (also known as "spam") and the site policy tells you that they are selling contact information and/or e-mail addresses, this should send up all kinds of red flags!
  
  Evaluate the privacy vs. SPAM tradeoff, and see if there is another site the can offer the same level of service without selling your e-mail address.
  
  If you believe that this is the only site for you to use, you should establish a special e-mail account for this site (i.e. a Yahoo.com or HotMail.com, etc. account) and disguise (or leave out) as much contact information as you can. Just remember to access the new e-mail account on a regular basis in case a potential employer tries to reach you through it.
  
  
• "Cookies!" Who's got the cookies?
  
  You do, most probably, on your computer's hard drive, and the Privacy Policy should tell you how they are used by the site you are visiting.
  
  Most commercial Web sites use cookies (a very small bit of text that is placed on your computer's hard drive to be retrieved by the browser) to keep track of where you have been and what you have done so that you don't get lost on their site. If you have a "MyMonster," "MyYahoo," "MyExcite," etc. account at a Web site, you have cookies on your computer. Job sites use cookies to make the link between you and your resume, for example.
  
  In most cases, cookies are harmless. For example, cookies are used to keep track of how often you visit (information usually aggregated with others as a measure of site effectiveness), what advertisers you visited from the site (so that the web site owner can get compensated for "sending" you to the advertiser's Web site, if/when you go there), what pages you viewed at the Web site (helps the Web site owner improve the site), what products you purchased (cookies make the "shopping cart" work), etc. Many sites cannot work without cookies!
  
  
• Other issues with Privacy Policies:
  
  Privacy Policies are violated by sites where the policies are not distributed widely within the organization. So site employees may violate the posted Privacy Policy out of ignorance, not maliciousness, although the impact on visitors trusting the policy is the same regardless of intent.
  
  Sites may change their Privacy Policy without notice.
  
  Obviously, this is an area of cyberspace that is still under development. The legal system is catching up and most commercial Web site owners understand the necessity of having a "trusted" environment, so we are headed in the right direction.
  
  Don't be discouraged; just be careful.
  

Resume Distribution Services:

Be very cautious about posting your resume on an Internet news or discussion group or an employment site which will "blast" your resume all over the Internet. Such wide distribution may offer little, if any, control on where a copy of your resume could end up. Your name, address, and phone number, in addition to your education and work experience, could become completely public...for a very long time.

If you feel that you must use a resume distribution service, try to minimize the amount of personal contact information that is distributed. See Cyber-Safe Resumes for some techniques to use to create your own privacy protection. Choose Internet Resume for help customizing an on-line version of your resume.

Choosing a Job Site can be tough, and should be approached carefully. Read this section of Job-Hunt.Org before you start posting your resume at any job sites.