The NSA will get all my data!

We are starting a series of questions we were asked about the group via e-mail, social media, or face to face. Question no.1 is about privacy. It was not so much a question as a statement that “the whole thing is bad because it feeds even more data to the NSA”.

Our answer is: no, it does not feed any data to anyone else than the person you are sending it to, just like you would previously send a .doc or .pdf file. We do not plan to establish or even recommend a centralized database of resumes. There are numerous reasons why it would be bad which we might cover in another post. For this post, it is sufficient to say that this group is not a company, not a data collection centre, or anything like it. Our specifications are recommendations and best practice guidelines. We bring together various existing tools and technologies to create a more pleasant application and recruiting experience.

Any software we might produce in the process will be under the MIT license, as stated in the charter. Everything we do is publicly available on this blog, the mailing list, or GitHub. This is a collective process to enhance something that is happening repeatedly – searching for a job.