A powerful coalition of children’s charities is urging ministers to make it illegal for companies to trawl Facebook and other social networking websites for information on prospective recruits.

They say that employers and educational establishments are known to be browsing the internet looking for “digital dirt” on young people who have applied for positions.

The eight charities acted partly in response to a report in The Times that revealed one in five employers used the internet to check on candidates, and two thirds of those who did said that their decisions were influenced by what they found.

A senior tutor at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had also said that he used Facebook to check up discreetly on applications for a college position.

The charities, including the NSPCC, the Children’s Society and NCH, said that the call for a new law is part of their wider concerns about online safety for children.

John Carr, secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, who is coordinating the campaign, said that pictures or gossip up-loaded during the teenage years should not be used against a young person ten years later.

“When young people put up their personal profiles they are not thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It’s a bit like looking at someone’s diary,” Mr Carr told The Times.

“A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms.”

The children’s charities are seeking clarification on whether discrimination legislation could be used to stop companies from using social networking sites for recruitment purposes.

Existing law requires equal opportunities for recruitment, and a system where some candidates have sites and others do not may breach that law. If that is not sufficient, the charities have been advised that data protection law could be tightened to require an employer to seek permission to access online data in the same way that they get permission to approach referees.

Margaret Moran, Labour MP for Luton South, is to lead the campaign in Parliament. She is discussing with Commons authorities the terms of a ten-minute rule Bill to tighten legislation. She has also written to James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, asking him to give his opinion on whether it is legitimate for employers to use information from social networking sites for recruitment.

“Social networking sites were never intended as a factual reference point for young people,” Ms Moran said. “The technology allows unverified content to go up very easily. It is simple to load up spoof profiles and meddle with images. Companies have no way to verify what is up there.”

The charities have approached the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) for support. Deborah Fernon, resourcing adviser at the CIPD, said at this stage the institute would not favour a ban, although she advised companies to be careful if they used sites for recruitment purposes.

“I wouldn’t want it to become illegal because in some industries, advertising and IT for example, personal sites have become almost a CV in itself, and that might become more commonplace,” she said.

“But we would warn companies that in the quest to find the right person for a job, social networking sites could be at best irrelevant and at worst misleading. Also, good practice requires that every candidate is treated equally, which means all candidates would have to have similar profiles before information is used, otherwise it would be discriminatory.”

Recently the charities won a powerful backer when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who created the world wide web, said that online data and web history belong to the individual who put them there. But he warned young people to think carefully about what they put on their sites, because others saw it as common property.

David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner, has also pointed out that despite the privacy settings offered by service providers, more than half of young people make their profile pages public. Mr Smith said: “The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees.”

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