As part of the draft of a law governing workplace privacy, the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting.
The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet on Wednesday gave its backing to the proposed law. The bill will now go to Parliament for discussion, and could be passed as early as this year, Mr. Spauschus said.
The law also would prohibit companies from secretly videotaping employees, though they could still videotape in certain areas as long as they disclosed the fact. It would also allow employers to hold secret investigations when they suspected a crime had been committed.
Germany's Nazi-era history has made the country extremely cautious on matters of individual privacy. Concerns have been heightened in recent years by scandals involving companies' secret videotaping of employees, as well as intercepting their e-mail and bank data. The explosion of Web-based information tools has added to the unease.
The German authorities are investigating Google for having collected private Internet information while doing research for its Street View mapping service, and they have asked Apple to explain its data-collection policies for the iPhone.
Facebook, which says it has more than 500 million users worldwide, with about 10 million in Germany, has come under fire for what some consider privacy shortcomings, as when the site changed its default settings to reveal more of individuals' personal data. The German proposal, however, is aimed squarely at employers.
Peter Schaar, the German commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, told The Associated Press that the proposal was "a substantial improvement on the status quo in dealing with employees' data."
There are currently no rules governing how companies use Facebook data, Mr. Spauschus said. The proposal is meant to create guidelines for the courts in handling the cases that will inevitably arise as social networking penetrates further into everyday life, he said, and companies would also benefit from clear rules.
Sarah Roy, a spokeswoman in Paris for Facebook, said the company generally did not comment on legislation as a matter of policy. But she said that the Web site's privacy settings allowed users to share information as broadly or as narrowly as they liked, either with entire networks or with a limited number of participants.