Recruit scored students' odds of ghosting a job offer, sold the score to employers

Recruit Career, a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings, ran a job-hunting platform called Rikunabi used by hundreds of thousands of Japanese students. A companion service, Rikunabi DMP Follow, analysed students' browsing activity on the platform and used it to calculate a probability score of how likely each student was to decline a job offer they had already informally accepted — then sold that score to the corporate clients who had made the offers.

The company had revised its privacy policy in March 2019 to cover this new data use, but Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission found the disclosure was incomplete across several versions of the sign-up flow: scores for 7,983 students were provided to employers without the required consent even under the revised policy, and the total group whose data reached employers without proper consent grew to 26,060 once the commission's review widened.

The service was suspended in July 2019 after the regulator began questioning it and discontinued permanently on 4 August 2019. On 26 August 2019 the commission issued Recruit Career its first-ever formal administrative recommendation under the data protection law, alongside guidance citing failures in both security-management obligations and third-party data disclosure, and Tokyo's labour bureau issued its own guidance days later over the practice's conflict with job-placement fairness rules.