I don’t think we’ve had similar public discussions here in Australia.

It seems like one of those unenforceable laws – which would have a practical application of “If you google someone, then it is illegal to ask them about what you find during a job interview”. Which would be similar practice here in Australia.

Unethical as it sounds, as a potential employer I would google an employee. I’d do it with two things in mind:
1. The potential employee who has really offensive stuff onlne that is likely to sway an employee against them is probably really naive about how the ‘net works, so wouldn’t be a good person to work in a library.
2. Many, many of my employees probably have similar private lives that they are not living online, so I should adjust my own moral judgment accordingly. *I* would be pretty naive if I pre-judged what appeared in a private context as relevant to a professional interview. If they were obsessed with sports, had a different sexuality to me, used language I thought was juvenile or had extreme religious beliefs then *I* should get over that and judge them in professional context.

I think that it would mitigate what I found online if the candidate had a professional online presence that demonstrated that they had qualities required for the job – for example that they were involved in professional events or understood issues affecting libraries. What wouldn’t mitigate would be a professional online presence that they had obviously set up just for job interviews that has little more than a pretty photo and the CV I had just read. Unless I could be sure that they did the work setting it up themselves, then they wouldn’t even get brownie points for being able to make the site.

It seems to me that asking for the candidate’s links helps with the privacy issue if (big IF) the employer sticks to those links instead of Googling the potential hire, which seems more likely to turn up random or unwanted links–or incorrect ones.