Can you believe it? It’s becoming a standard procedure for employers and schools to ask for potential applicants’ Facebook profiles! And if you have a restricted profile, they would ask for your password or adding them so they could view everything on your profile. Seems “personal profile” suddenly became a part of your CV and nothing you post on your wall is too trivial to overlook.
Employers, potential employers, or colleges behave like some kind of investigators, Sherlock Holmes who want to inspect people’s profiles. I think it’s embarrassing. This is a straight attack on personal liberties and people should protect their privacy and their rights.
Catherine Crump, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney recently said:
It’s an invasion of privacy for private employers to insist on looking at people’s private Facebook pages as a condition of employment or consideration in an application process.
Everyone understands that this is illegal and is a violation of workers’ rights, and still so many companies and schools are doing it! Even people at Facebook know about it! Erin Egan, who is the privacy officer of Facebook, said that:
This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends. It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.
This practice quickly became a big deal, because US government officials already started to debate the issue and a number of senators began to fight this awful practice. For example: New York Senator Charles Schumer and Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate if the practice violates federal laws. They even did more than that as they will be working on legislation that would fill any gaps in federal law that allow employers to require personal login information from prospective employees to be considered for a job.
There already is a Social Media Privacy bill prepared by Maryland Senator Ronald Young. He did it after learning about numerous cases of applicants at the Department of Corrections in Maryland having had to sit and watch their employer go through their Facebook page and students being forced to share their Facebook logins with schools. He also learned that some schools require students to download social media monitoring software, like UDilidence and Varsity Monitor, which can access their password-protected content. Can you imagine that? It’s like getting rid of a huge part of your personal life. Truly the Big Brother is here!
Senator Young tries to stress that it may not be the organizations fault. Maybe they just don’t know they are violating personal rights and invading citizens’’ privacy:
Lots of these organizations don’t realize they are asking the same thing as monitoring a phone call or reading your personal mail.
I think there is no discussion what many of these employers and universities are doing IS illegal. What pisses me really off is no one is suing them! They should pay for their actions!
We don’t need social media lawyer and expert in the field, such as Bradley Shear who said that if they are a public institution they could be violating the first, fourth, and fifth amendments.
Think again about an institution asking for access to your personal data. That’s preposterous! How could anyone ask for this and expect people to say “ok here’s my password”. It’s almost like giving strangers your car keys, your home keys, and letting strangers to come by at any time and check every crack of your house. All that just for a job or a place in a school…
What would I recommend? I think you’re supposed to always answer “No”. And then sue. No one has the right to invade your privacy like that. And don’t get fooled by that argument: “if you have nothing to hide, you can keep your profile public and you should have nothing to worry about”. It doesn’t matter. It’s your personal profile and you have every right to keep it private.
