Employers viewing applicants' Facebook profiles raises legal issues. It could enable discrimination based on attributes like race, gender or religion. It also violates users' privacy expectations, since profiles are intended to be private to friends, not potential employers. Reviewing profiles may also breach Facebook's terms of service barring commercial use and could implicate laws around fair credit reporting if obtained via a third party.

1. How could it be challenged in court?

2. Discrimination It is unlikely for an employer to learn any deal of job-related information from a Facebook page they won’t learn in the context of a well-run interview They are simply making room for discrimination Applicants could easily be filtered by race, gender, age, religion, etc.

3. Invasion of Privacy Facebook was intentionally designed so that your profile is only available to your friends and other people on your networks If employers are not within this domain of seemingly private network than it creates issues of privacy

4. Terms of Service Violation “You understand that the Service and the Web site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.” Using Facebook for employment decisions could easily be viewed as a commercial use

5. Fair Credit Reporting Act Despite its name, this law has broader application than credit inquiries It might apply if the Facebook information was obtained by a third party investigator such as a background-checking service It would not prohibit use of the information, but would require disclosure of the fact that such information was the basis for the decision.