Twitter and Facebook.

'How moral this espionage is still worries me.' Photo: Reuters

It's creepy to think that you're being stalked. But how much creepier is it that a group of people sit around a long table analysing information on your Facebook profile in order to decide whether you're worthy of a job in their organisation?

Not only are we told that this repugnant practice occurs but it's promoted as a reality in the education system.

I remember hearing a lecture in Year 9 before applying for work experience placements. We were herded into the gym to watch advisable work presentation videos and where a group of experts told us to delete all information that could make us vulnerable to employer scrutiny of our social pages.

The presenter, ignoring the boys, said words along the lines of ''now you girls have all sorts of profile photos. The one cutely cuddling with your pussycat, the one with your best girlfriends at the beach in summer, the one kissing your boyfriend, the one at a party in a mini-skirt with a can of beer. Now, I want all you girls to go through your Facebook photos tonight when you get home. The reason is that organisations who want to hire you will, without a doubt, see these photos and think twice about employing you. They, from your photos, can judge how serious and willing you are as a worker; and frankly girls, no one will want to hire you if you look like a St Kilda prostitute. So just go home tonight, have a look through your photos, and ask yourselves this: which ones would you feel uncomfortable about if your parents and grandparents saw them? With that in mind, delete those photos because your employers will see them.''

My classmates were terrified at this order and surely enough went home and deleted photos. The next day, the subdued corridors echoed with awkward murmurs such as ''hey … can you remove that photo of me hooking up with that guy … ''

In all this, there's an assumption that snooping on our social pages is legitimate. I have since discovered that there are strict guidelines in universities, say, that interviews and decisions must be based solely on the application of the candidate. Extraneous information is private and is specifically banned from consideration. Good organisations are so scrupulous about it that they have HR representatives in the room to ensure that the guidelines are observed.

These excellent principles, however, fail to be honoured in one circumstance: when it concerns young people. In two television interviews that I recently took part in, I was horrified to understand that media people also expect that employers will trawl through the social pages of youths seeking employment.

In one interview, a HR guy brazenly said not only that this practice occurred but that the system was effective. He gloated over how much you could find out. When I objected that it was unethical, I was told that in certain cases, it worked in favour of ethics. For example, an employer can check out the social activities of people on sick leave to establish if they're honest or false.

How moral this espionage is still worries me; but it still doesn't justify spying on kids routinely before they're hired.

The prevalence of these vetting techniques then made me wonder: what is the value proposition in spying on teenagers through their social pages? Are you unsuitable for employment if you tongue-kiss a boy at a party? Won't you get a job if you once had a nightclub look? What are we trying to sift out with this prejudicial discrimination? What possible information could be useful to an employer in evaluating the capacity for work?

What does it say for the calibre of Australian management that it's swayed by such trivia in judging prospective staff? What are the company executives basing their decisions on that they'd welcome information about weekend frolicking? Do they think that being serious and suitable for work means that you have to be dull at home? Above all, can't they see that it's wrong to be judging people's work potential on the strength of their partying? Instead of social media being a liberating, inclusive solace, we are being made to construct our profiles just as we would a CV.

When teachers say: ''Do you know that employers will actually search you on Facebook'', they are implicitly condoning, rather than condemning, this despicable and illogical intrusiveness. Why aren't they devoting their energies to berating search companies for cyber-stalking?

Sadly, educational programs promote the idea and create the expectation that this scrutiny will take place, presenting the idea as an established convention.

Instead of going after youth, why doesn't the government protect them? HR-stalking should be illegal if it isn't already. Why doesn't the government require companies to disclose whether they use social-media vetting or not? That way, it can organise a blacklist of HR companies that do.

The reason we aren't seeing protections against HR-stalking is that it suits educational authorities to suppress the privileges of sexual expression among young people.

It's all a part of the fear campaign against teenagers, where the horror of youth sexuality and the internet makes our adult guardians forget about ethics.

Olympia Nelson is a year 11 student