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Facebook: Legal Action Against Employers Asking For Your Password
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook today weighed in on the issue of employers asking current and prospective employees for their Facebook passwords. The company noted that doing so undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user's friends, as well as potentially exposes the employer to legal liability. The company is looking to draft new laws as well as take legal action against employers who do this."
A least one U.S. Senator agrees with them.
it would be fun. Help me facebook.
...employers will just ask potential employees to accept their HR staff's friend request, as the article yesterday stated. But one could easily get around that by making sure the HR staff is in a Facebook list that has no access to a user's wall/timeline and other info. Still, seems like the employer wouldn't like that and they would find some way to get the employee to let HR in. :(
My Daily photo website.
Has a single company that has done this been identified by name? Every article I've seen does NOT mention any name, making it sound more anecdotal than factual.
Wait, what? Facebook interceding to protect the privacy of its users?
We're going to need to wear our long underwear to that flying pig cookout in Hell.
I find myself curious as to what these (current or prospective) employers do with candidates who, assuming they meet all other criteria for the job, don't have social media accounts? That's one I haven't seen addressed in the various articles that have discussed this topic in recent weeks.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
You can't have my password no more.....
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Make part of the Facebook login process to enter your your race, age, marital status, or other things that it is illegal for employers to ask you about in an interview. If they ask you to log in for them, you can claim that that is a form of asking you that information and is not allowed.
If you have a good lawyer, you can probably sue them already. In most facebook accounts, people provide a lot of information that it is illegal for the employer to ask about - age, gender, race, sexuality. Employers can't ask these questions, and similarly, they can't ask questions that they know will reveal that information. We don't really need a new law, just a smart lawyer
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Anyone can draft a law. Even Reddit. Even you. Then that party needs to convince a member of the House or Senate to introduce it, and then both need to pass it, and the President needs to sign it, and (if applicable) the Supreme Court needs to uphold it. Take a Civics class.
My content is posted publicly, but many of my friends don't do the same.
So for me to give out my password to a prospective employee would only gain them the ability to spy on people who aren't even applying for the job!
So if you want my password, get a warrant. And if you can't get a warrant because you're not law enforcement, who the hell are you to be asking in the first place?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Since the current laws about unauthorized network/computer access are vague enough to include doing something against any website's terms of service couldn't FB just put it their TOS? Then setup a bounty or whistle blower reporting system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Right after you give me the root password to the company's servers!
Seems like a fair trade to me...
it should be legislated that at any time someone declares social media to be the wave of the future, a round of eye rolling and fart-noise making should commence immediately.
this is a company that spies on you for the US government, sells your data to anyone who wants it, and is totally content to insist it has full legal rights over all of your content, indefinitely, with or without your consent.
close your facebook account and consider checking out some meat-space human interaction tools like meetup.com. there arent any buttons to indicate the position of your thumbs, and when you like something you just tell someone "hi, i enjoy this." Best of all, no asshole corporation pretending theyre doing you a favour by scouring your personal life for hints of product placement opportunities or subversive anti-government opinions. As a bonus, your employer will have the freeedom to hire you based on their objective opinion of your job skills and critical thinking ability, not your farmville or mafiawars score and picture of that drunken bender at grizzlebees where you wore the fried onion like a head-crab from Half-Life.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As I posted in a similar story discussion, this will just become an HR screen checkbox requirement that will play out like this:
"Please provide your FacePlace login information here."
"I don't use FacePlace."
"Right. Applicant failed to produce FacePlace login information."
How much of an asshole do you have to be to ask your employee for a password of a personal service they're using? If I didn't know better I'd say it's impossible to be so far high on that scale.
I'd just use this as a screening question for potential employees.
If you willingly give me your login credentials I should just assume you're a moron and not hire you.
And it will always be my answer. Whether or not I use facebook is no one's business. Not my family. Not my friends. Not my co-workers or employers. "Please wear this delightful necklace with a GPS and a camera to take pictures of whatever is around you at any given time. BTW, it's a condition of employment." There's just something dark and sinister about that. How any employer could think this is a great idea when they know damned well they wouldn't be willing to share that information with their employees is looking upon their employees as a "lesser being" and certainly not equal as idealized by the US constitution. If this is not a "discriminatory act" it most definitely leads to discriminatory behavior.
There is already a list of things an employer cannot ask an employee for. I think it's time to make a law which issues a WHITE LIST of things employers can ask for rather than using the black list system we have today. The potential for this to become an ever-growing problem is too great.
Up until now I thought it was just an urban legend. "Like any company would smear itself with mud by doing something so vile and contemptible." And now it turns out, this actually happened!? o_O
As a Finn, I hope this is one of those macabre policies of corporations running rampant and unchecked, confined to the USA. At least in Finland (and I think most of the EU) this shit just wouldn't stand legal ground.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Right. That is the fix. A new law. Lets make a new law for every issue that crops up and see how long the judicial system lasts.
except in the UK where they ask your religion, your sexual preference, your race etc.
True, but it always says "you do not have to supply this information" then something about not doing so won't affect your likelihood of getting a job but that they hope you will because it helps them monitor their diversity.
Why does the DMCA not apply? Why are these companies all not in violation of the the DMCA.
The users contents is private and password protected. The users content is copyright protected work of the user and their friends.
***ANY*** attempt to violate the users password protection would seem to me to be a violation of DMCA. Does not ANY method to break DRM include intimidation of the key holder ?
A college senior graduating from a teaching credential program applied for a job in a school system. The school system saw her MySpace page which had a picture of her obviously at a part with a red Solo cup in hand. She wasn't underage as the picture was current. She was just smiling, having a good time. They withdrew their job offer. AFAIK, no action was taken by the applicant (I'd sue).
I asked a client who is an attorney but practices a different, specialized type of law. While it's OK for some places like Home Depot to require a drug test prior to employment, that still happens farther down the interview chain. I don't want some person in the store driving a forklift when they're intoxicated or impaired.
I can't see asking for FB or MySpace or any of the other social media site access as acceptable. LinkEdIn, as much as I hate them and how they work, is different. I don't think you'll see party pictures or any of my LOLcat pictures on a LinkEdIn profile. Just doing a Google search of myself shows my name in various news group posts even though I post with no-archive. While it's almost impossible to exclude 'the stuff on the Internet' from an employer's background search, omitting stuff like what's in your FB (I'm gay, jewish and my politics are none of your business) cross the line.
I wonder what would happen if the first thing they saw is "Thanks for logging access to my FB page. I now own your house and the assets of your company. Have a great day. And good luck finding a new job."
I dunno, didn't we already have an article years ago about how those higher up the hierarchy tend to be more sociopathic? Well, here's the original link: Is Your Boss A Psychopath?
But anyway, if you have to ask "how much of an asshole does someone have to be to do X?" I think you'll find that there are big enough assholes to do just about anything. Especially in positions that involve money, power, or both. In fact it seems like even the drive to end up in a position with enough power to no longer have to give a damn about the peons around, is disproportionately higher in... exactly those who are sick and tired of having to fake giving a damn about those peons around them.
But at any rate, let's just say that goatse was a lightweight, compared to the kind of huge assholes you see in upper management ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Says Mr. 6534 /. account. Bad news for you: This is social media, too.
And in case you didn't look, there's the option to put all sorts of crud in your profile, plus non-blocked people can scan every comment you ever posted.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Did I miss something?
I know we've all heard about regulatory capture by corporations and lobbyists, but has it gotten so blatant that businesses don't even try to hide it nowadays?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Many laws are not drafted by legislators, they are drafted by various third parties with various agendas pushing any number of special interests made up of people with inside knowledge on how 'the process' works including former legislators and staffers. They are all introduced by current legislators with ties to those groups (Chambers of commerce, political action committees, other membership based organizations, etc...) though.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Overbearing employers are nothing new; this is just HR prying into applicants lives with 'on the internet' appended. Whether it's drug tests, credit checks, IQ exams or 3-day multi-person interviews, some companies will push the boundaries and the people will have to push back, sometimes with politics and laws.
Imagine if an employer said they want to inspect your home and interview your family. If the job involves a top secret clearance maybe that's OK but not for 99% of jobs. And here's my point: nobody would agree to having their home inspected and HR wouldn't even think to ask. It's only because social networking is new that anyone even wonders if might be reasonable.
Since the beginning of the web (I started developing websites around the beginning of 95) I have been ever careful of what I put out... The key is to make it look "real", but not enough to make you look bad.
I've filtered myself too, as I'm sure most of Slashdot has, but we should really focus on fighting for everyones rights. No matter how well we may protect ourselves we all have to live with societies attitudes. As technical folk we have the best chance of setting the norms for life on the internet.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
How is Facebook supposed to sell this information if companies can demand it for free from new hires?
it would be fun. Help me facebook.
Humor aside, if that is your goal you do not need help from facebook nor a new law. Existing laws will do quite nicely. For example it is illegal to ask a job candidate their age and a prospective employer can get sued for doing so. Logging into a facebook account exposes a prospective employer to much such prohibited information.
It is possible (and very easy) for a company to install key loggers and monitoring software on their own company computers. Once employees steal time from their employer and update their Facebook page the employer now has the password. When the employer does use the password they check it through a proxy service like Tor. Easy, untraceable, and quiet.
When there is something that the employer doesn't like on the Facebook page the employee will face eventual job termination. Their performance reviews will be poor, the monitoring logs will be used to show misuse of company computers and time, and any complaints by customers will be fully utilized. The content of the Facebook posting will never be referenced and the person will be terminated for valid reasons. After being fired any unemployment benefits will be contested (yes, the ex-employee usually wins regardless), and then appealed (50-50 chance).
Certainly this is not how it is done at any company that I manage.
I'm afraid the Maryland DOC case is a poor example of invasion of privacy.
yes and no. actually, mostly no. The MD case was so egregious because applicants had to log in during the interview and the foolio giving the interview would peruse his shizznit. if the info is passed on to third party background mofos, then this is less demeaning because your potential boss or coworkers isn't snickering at your personal junk. sounds like invasion of privacy to me.
fb assumes under their Terms of Use you are who you say you are subject to expulsion if you violate. AFAIK no other forum requires that. If I want to call myself Lord Awesome then I am Lord Awesome. My W2 however has a different name on it. That's my point. And in fact More than one person can be Lord Awesome.
It makes me feel dirty, but "Go Facebook!"
On the other hand, the cynical side of me thinks this is just so Mark can monetize giving the information to employers as part of a "background check". They could provide "compatibility rankings" based on employeer criteria without ever letting the employeer see the private data itself and thus avoiding privacy issues. Yeap, I think I'll keep with my no Facebook policy and if someone doesn't want to hire me because I don't have one, I don't want to work for them anyway.
Try this, "FacePlace is a known security risk; the Chinese use it regularly for espionage. Should I be contacting our Counter-Intelligence Agencies about this company?"
Sit back and watch the HR weenie crap themselves.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I would give such an employer a little surprise to make them think twice next time. :-)
Sure I will just have a fake facebook. Pick of me on my user icon just like my real one. Give them the password and as soon as they log in have a very large zoomed in pic of the bloody ass in GOATSE as my post.
With white text caption saying you violated my rights I figured I would violate yours. Enjoy your lunch hour ... come on guys. Be creative
http://saveie6.com/
"Insinuated he may be working for a Chinese corporation for industrial espionage."
Boss: Well, you seem like you're just what we're looking for. You're hired.
Ms. Applicant: Great! When can I start?
Boss: (chuckling) Whoa, Nellie, we just need to get through a few things first! Here's a list of things you must relinquish to this office by closing tonight. (hands over list)
Ms. Applicant: My diary?
Boss: Mmm, the one with the unicorns and rainbows on the cover. I spotted it through my binocs on your bookshelf last night from the parking lot outside your apartment.
Ms. Applicant: Ah, perfectly acceptable and law-abiding. (reads on, nods) My underwear drawer, of course.
Boss: We need to know if there's leather in there. I'm sure you understand that we can't have any of THAT going on in the office.
Ms. Applicant: No, that's absolutely fine. Do you need my list of family and friends in its entirety, as well?
Boss: That's on the list... here. (points) We'll need to call each and every one of them and apply our potential-employee questionnaire to them. I can't divulge that to you; I'm sure you understand.
Ms. Applicant: Of course, of course.
Boss: Your complacency and blindness to our ridiculous rules is very appreciated, sweetie. I'm sure that by this time next week, you'll be our best burger-flipper we've ever had!
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
If an employer demands this kind of access, we should all show up at their HQ with pitchforks and lighted torches, boycots and strikes. This wouldn't have been tolerated for a second 80 years ago. If, back then, an employer wanted to read your personal diary, you'd laugh in their face and the (back then free, non-corporate) press would have had a field day, if you were even unlucky enough to be what would have been (rightly) considered a 'wage-slave'. But this was before popular organization was crushed by corporations by relentless and massive anti-union, anti-organization propaganda campaingns in all forms of (corporate owned) media. Yeah, let facebook of all people handle it for us. We all know they're a champion of personal freedom and privacy. Nothing to do with the NSA whatsoever.
Prison guards are not much different from regular mall guards - they are not law enforcement officers working for a government agency.
Maryland Department of Corrections doesn't sound like a government agency to you?
A sworn law enforcement officer, or perhaps more accurately a sworn peace officer, covers a wide array of jobs. This includes corrections officers.
Your opinion reminds me of college. Nearly every quarter there was a story in the school paper about some student who got arrested after telling campus police that he didn't have to listen to them, that they were just rent-a-cops, etc. In truth they were sworn peace officers with the jurisdiction and authority of state police, it was a public university.
Can anyone name an employer other than the MD Dept of Corrections that has done this? I've been following the links and that is the only one named. There are multiple references to a 'rising trend' and such but no real evidence of any such thing. The closest I got was employers using a Facebook app with applicants to monitor their jobs history (Sears) but the article did not say this was mandatory, just described it as a recruiting tool.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Asking somebody for a password is not far from kicking their door in and checking out their underwear drawer. The 4th amendment has been weakened, but if the founding fathers had had computers they would not have been too big on George III or anyone else demanding passwords. To be sure, current case law only applies to the government, not private entities who are not acting on behalf of the government, but the entire purpose of existing laws protecting privacy--including whole sh*tloads of questions you can't ask in a job interview--and of constitutional protections is, well, to protect privacy. For example, it is illegal to ask job applicants if they have any tattoos even though at one time people with tattoos were something like 88 times more likely to steal. Nor can you ask about marital status. And on and on and on.
The only reason employers can ask for passwords is that the law has not yet caught up with technology.
Personally, I think you ought to be willing to go on food stamps before giving some assh*le personnel dept. your passwords. But that's just me.
If he coughs up the password, definitely do not hire him.
Ok, don't sign. That's fine.
Here is the door. Good luck to you, sir. Your paycheck that will include today's work will be sent on XYZ date.
Oh, did you think a severance was something you are entitled to? I see your line of reasoning a lot of slashdot. The time to negotiate is not when you are being laid off/fired. Consider yourself lucky for getting anything above and beyond a pink slip.
Turn it down and try to negotiate at your own risk.