Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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."
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.
What happens when the answer is "mu?"
They will be suspicious that you are lying and not hire you. Or they will think you are a technophobe and not hire you. Or they will think you are a cow and not hire you. That may sound unreasonable, but if they were reasonable, they would not ask for the information in the first place.
its worse. many (!) employers ask/demand to have you pee in a cup, for them.
its fine and reasonable to say that you don't have a FB account. but just try telling them you don't have any piss in you! they just won't believe it.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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
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 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.
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.
Am I ever glad I don't live in whatever backwater country you're in. In the civilized world, severance is mandated by law in the case of a layoff, either in the form of advance notice ("we'll be shutting down operations next November, line something up now and if you get a job before then, we'll give you a reference"), or pay in lieu of notice ("you're all done. pack your things, go home. your final pay will have 4 weeks' pay in lieu of the notice"). The amount of notice or pay in lieu is dictated by the size of the layoff... a small layoff of 20 or fewer people is only 2 weeks, with it increasing significantly with the number of people being let go. When Dell shut down operations in this city, I walked away with a $25,000 severance package (which would have been more, but I was given 4 weeks' notice), and got to keep my medical benefits for 6 months, and I wasn't anywhere near senior management.
There is a difference between being laid off and being fired.