Maryland bans employers from asking for employee social media passwords
dailycaller.com
dailycaller.com
Companies wouldn't dream of searching my car or house before hiring me. How they ever got the idea that they should be able to require my passwords is beyond me.
Social media would not have been the last step, either. Email passwords would have been next. And then searching personal computers, especially cellphones and laptops.
And once they were drunk with that power, what else would they require? "Permission" to tap your phones? That sounds ridiculous right now, but a year ago it would have been ridiculous for a company to ask for your personal passwords. And now we're having to enact laws against it.
I hope other states are quick to follow on this... Or that the federal government gets their heads out of their asses and passes it nation-wide. Wasn't that the whole point of the bill of rights? To protect freedom, nation-wide?
Employees or prospective employees agree to give up said passwords only if hiring manager/company gives them their social media account passwords. I.E - If I have nothing to hide, you have nothing to hide. You know employer an employee can never be to sure who they are working for ...
An entire side industry might spring up entirely geared toward managing and tracking who sees what on your social networks or, social networks might respond by letting you set up two logins - one for safe log in that only you know and one for compromised login that you give to an employer when they compromise you.
I hope that long before the states need to pass more laws like this that employees or prospective employees would publicly avoid business/government agencies asking for social media logins. "I really wanted that great job at Great Company, but it has asked me for my social media logins and stated that it would hold the things I did as a teenager against me."
The public perception that it is wrong to ask an employee/prospective employee is very strong and the more negative marketing associated to an employer gets around that will not only keep other employees away but it will chip away the confidence existing employees have that they work for a good employer.
As it stands now though, you are correct there is very much an imbalance between employers and employees in favor of the employers.
Everyone has something to hide. And even if they were some miraculous existence that didn't, their privacy is still their right.
Sure, something might eventually crop up to stop it, but in the meantime, it's happening now.
And finally, when I suggest that people stop working for unethical or abusive companies, they reply, "But people need to eat." ... Yeah. So if they'll put up with that level of abuse, there's no way they're going to refuse a job on the grounds of 'password privacy abuse'.
I'm all with you when you suggest that people stop working for unethical/abusive companies. One way to figure out how much they value their employees is during the interview process when you have the chance to ask them smart questions. Employment is a two way street and the more tools employees have to make it an equal give/take relationship the better for all.
Cali, you're up next (I hope!)
After having just pee'd in cup last week for a pre-employment screen, I do hope that someday governments will also ban senseless and stupid drug testing for jobs that don't actually require 24/7 sobriety (eg software engineering).
Then again, many financials are American...
It should be my right as an employer to hire anyone that I wish (just like it is your right as an employee to not accept a position or quit).
You say it has no effect, but you can't tell me it has no effect on productivity, I just won't believe it (I've known too many pot heads in my life). Also, if my company required my employees to be on-call with customer support, I don't want someone under the influence of anything handling these sorts of emergencies.
If you ban drug testing, employers will just hire people who they think are drug users less often and you won't really be able to prove it.
However, for the purpose of employment, drug testing is needlessly intrusive in all but a few special cases. It is just simply not needed and risks creating far more problems than it attempts to solve.
Going down the path of money trumps all other concerns or "perfect market results in perfect results", you would soon arrive at a "Gattaca" situation and beyond where unless every single DNA base you possess is perfect, every behaviour is perfect from birth, everyone you have ever networked with is similiarly perfect, etc., you will never be employable or move beyond a specific bracket alloted to you by society. In the meantime, costs to existing businesses and challenges to entrants would skyrocket in a self-defeating spiral, while incredible talent that may suit your company dies by the wayside unused or misallocated.
Drug testing and much more, as technology now and in future allows, may be fine for the cutting edge of physical endeavours or positions of massive responsibility for human individuals where even a second of downtime could make or break a company, but for anyone else, that is well beyond reasonable.
A basic analogy in one respect would be like applying military critical software certification standards and testing for bug-free processes (the kind that causes operating systems and software designed in the 70s to still be used) in all software ever produced from now...
Would you also refuse to hire an employee who drinks heavily on Friday/Saturday nights, yet never once comes to work drunk? Furthermore, would this even be legal (or ethical)?
Drug testing in the work environment has been shown to be counterproductive for many reasons. Since you seem to care more about the practical impact (not the ethical one), I'll focus on this one: marijuana remains detectable in the system for two weeks after use, whereas most drugs (like cocaine) are undetectable after two days.
So what's the message that you're sending your employees? 'On Friday night, rather than use marijuana, I'd prefer it if you used cocaine or methamphetamine instead.' That way, they'll be sure to pass Monday's drug test, which they'd have failed if they had been 'foolish' enough to inhale from a bong instead of a crack pipe/meth pipe!
So even if you think your employees shouldn't use drugs on their own time, even if it never affects their work, drug testing in the workplace is the worst way to encourage healthy behavior.
And sure, it's legal and ethical for an employer not to want to employ anyone they don't want to work with, as long as it's not a protected class. Drug use wasn't one of those, last I checked. It's not necessarily a smart idea to fire qualified people who smoke pot on their own time just because you don't like the idea of having pot smokers represent your company, but it's not wrong.
Damn you Americans have one fucked up country, all hail your corporate overlords!
Guess who doesn't take those tests too? The CEOs and the directors and the partners. They can snort as much coke as they want, but woe betide the worker bees doing it.
The utter hypocrisy of it all is astounding.
No, it is not your right; it must not be that absolute. That gives free reign to racist and other discriminatory practices, and the greater good absolutely and certainly trumps one's individual right here.
The kinds of practice you are advocating here - absolute freedom on the part of employers - have had a strong part in fomenting civil war and terrorism in various places around the world. Closest to my own home, Protestant practices in Northern Ireland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_in_Northern_Irelan... - and laws curbing this kind of segregation have had significant effects in reversing it.
It's hard for me to express how certain I am that the real world (tm) has proven your point of view wrong here. People do kill over this.
The other reason that drug testing is senseless and stupid is that it is imprecise. "False positives" do wreck careers and/or cause enormous hardship on good people, you might call it collateral damage, but to the people it occurs to it is a disaster.
In my own case, I had been scheduled to submit to a hair test as pre-employment screen. I showed up at the testing facility and was told my hair was too short and that a urine sample was required instead. These are different tests and the urine sample does check for alcohol consumption whereas the hair test does not. The previous night I shared a bottle of wine with dinner with my wife and I had also taken advil because of the headache induced by the stress of giving my termination notice at work. Everything turned out OK, but the stress caused by worrying about a stupid false positive because of the wine, advil, or my prescription was really not a nice experience. If there had been a false positive, I would have been begging for mercy, disclosing my drug prescription, explaining away the advil and wine. I guess some people would see value/pleasure in that. I fucking don't.
If someone isn't up to snuff, cut them loose. If someone works hard, smart and productively every day, why do you care what they do in their off time?
This isn't like mandating your employees be sober, which is a worthwhile rule. But imagine if you had a test which would detect whether an employee has had a beer any time within the past month. Do you think that would be a worthwhile test to base their employment on?
It's a waste of money in addition to a violation of privacy. Fire the people who don't perform to your expectations. Keep the ones who do. How hard is that?
Trust me, I've known a lot of pot heads too.
Whoever you are, stay the hell out of California please.
I did it once, many years ago, and then adopted a policy of refusing it (even though I don't use drugs or even alcohol.)
I could see the same thing happening if employers started requiring social media credentials. An new kind of social network would have an easy differentiator - "Come to our new social network, along with everything else, you can trust us because we give you two logins: a secure login that you keep for yourself and a compromised login that you give to the government and your employer."
I wonder if it is something I might use, not just for an interview with a potential employer but on other computers, not under my control.
Considering how careful most companies are to avoid any interview questions that would possibly open them up to this sort of thing, I'm kind of shocked the same organizations are silly enough to ask for a Facebook password in the first place.
Ask for password -> log into applicant's Facebook account -> Facebook account clearly identifies the subject as an openly gay Muslim -> applicant is denied job.
Because of discrimination? Maybe, maybe not, but prying into the applicant's Facebook account certainly opens the door to it being a reasonable possibility, just the same as asking them what their race/religion/sexual orientation is in an interview would.
It seems like a lot of people are up in arms about something that may not actually be a problem.
I have, and will continue, to check people out on social networks using publicly available info but I wouldn't ask for account access any more than I would ask if I could go around to their house and read their mail. I will repeat though, information that they have placed in the public domain is fair game.
It's a strange world we live in...
The post taken as a whole, on the other hand, and I think you may be onto something.
Let's say that every business adopted this "your passwords or your job" policy. There will be a set of employees/applicants with enough leverage in the job market that they can say "no", and move on with life.
There will also be a (much larger) set of employees and applicants that do not have that kind of leverage in the job market, and have to make a choice between their facebook password, and the freedom to starve. The former can rationally say "no". The latter rationally can't.
Limiting morality to those who can afford it doesn't sit well with me. I'm completely fine with the government stepping in to mitigate the effects of undue coercion in society.
Those who think that coercion only exists at the barrel of a gun, lack a certain amount of imagination.
A law that "protects" applicants from having the option to say "yes" lowers their income. Giving them the freedom to answer the question either way leaves them the choice between a higher income and the privacy of their Facebook account. It's not a happy choice, but if I valued the first more highly, I wouldn't like the government to force the second on me.
It seems infinitely more likely that employers would blanket policy everyone to give up their passwords, and every other bit of personal info period, or they wouldn't get a job.
I tend to fall more on the capitalist side of things. I wouldn't consider employment coercive, unless the bad alternative (e.g. starving) was actively being caused by the potential employers (something like "work for us for $1 an hour or else we will kick you off your land).
This is why the majority of people starting a business, fail. Looking at the comments here, people just give up at the first sign of trouble (or need mommy and daddy government to step in and make decisions on their behalf).
> "They can start a business or move onto a company that doesn't ask for any of this info."
Riiiiiiight. Because the blacks totally had that choice. And the women! And the Irish! And the Jews! It's kind of weird to me how libertarians model the world so simply - where culture doesn't exist, humans are perfectly rational actors, and all systems are 100% efficient. Real life isn't game theory.
1. Small societies where everyone has skills or resources that are essential to the others, or
2. Societies where everyone has resources to be self-sufficient.
There may also be a requirement that the society not be in competition with outside, non-libertarian societies for necessary resources, because libertarianism is poor at handling negative externalities. A non-libertarian society has the option of careful government regulation which allows better utilization of important natural resources.
You may be well off to afford not to work, there are lots of people for which that is the stark choice.
If enough people are angry about it, the employer will be forced to stop because they won't get enough candidates.
Stealing should be illegal in any case. It has nothing to do with labor laws.
> What if your employer wants to have sex with you?
Again. If you don't like prostitution, ban prostitution. It has nothing to do with labor laws.
> You either believe labor laws should exist or you don't.
> If you do, I don't think the answer need to be anything more than "common sense".
Those two sentences are classic logical fallacies. I can support just some labor laws and "common sense" is not an answer to anything.
While I think employers should not ask for these passwords, and don't have a "right" to, I also have the right-- freedom of association-- to not give them the password, and not work for companies that would even ask.
Maryland is interfering with these rights. Maryland is violating freedom of association by dictating what terms people might choose to associate under. I doubt the Maryland constitution gives them the power to do that, and certainly many interpretations of the Bill of Rights have claimed that they restrict state's lawmaking ability.
I don't know what employers might reasonably want this information. Possibly an employer might wish to conduct a background check for a highly security intensive position, and this check might involve access to some website (lets assume it is not Facebook) that the applicant feels perfectly comfortable with them seeing. Further, this access could be conducted with the employee present, with the employee changing the password immediately before giving the access and then changing it again immediately after, resulting in no ongoing access. I don't know what situation someone might find it reasonable to do this-- I can't know.
But neither can the government of Maryland. The problem with these kinds of laws is that they always have unintended consequences, and at the end of the day, any violation of peoples rights-- even with "good intentions" (though I bet this law exempts the state of Maryland itself) -- will result in less optimal outcomes.
For instance, consider the situation where this law is challenged and then upheld. That would establish a precedent that says the state can interfere with freedom of association, and such precedent might be used to undermine freedom of association in areas where we do care about preserving it. This has happened many times in the past-- for instance the "interstate commerce clause", which doesn't actually grant broad powers, but very narrow ones, has been rewritten via precedent to give the federal government essentially unlimited power, even where no commerce between states occurs.
I expect to be down voted for expressing this unpopular opinion. But hopefully Hacker News is the kind of place where making an argument -- even if most people disagree with it-- is respected. (and I'm curious to find out, having recently seen instances of it going both ways.)
That right also, sadly, depends on how much choice you have in the first place. What about those in less fortunate positions, the cleaners of the world if you will, who need a job, and need it now?
Surely in such cases, an individual's perceived rights disappear as their desperation to pay the rent increases?
However, back to jobs, even if you're poor, you still have the right to refuse. Just as even if there aren't a lot of girls in your town you may not want to shave your head to date your first choice. Desperation doesn't remove choice.
Further, the way things work out, there are a whole lot fewer Chairman of Goldman Sacks type jobs than there are janitor type jobs. Thus the fewer skills you have, the more jobs there are to choose from. This makes sense if you think about it- unskilled means no special training, so there are lots of industries that one might work in. While being skilled means training which immediately limits the number of industries where that training is relevant.
People want to accumulate skills and valuable ones, not because there are more jobs the more skill you have, but because there are fewer, and thus they are higher paying because there are even fewer people who can do them.
Further, remember that every employer is competing with each other. Employers do compete on quality of life for their employees.
I've seen others compare someone's assumed need for a job to a form of coercion-- as if because you imagine they might "really need" the job, then they're being "coerced" into submitting to something that we all disagree with.
But this is, strictly speaking, factually incorrect. Coercions is compelling someone to behave in an involuntary way. Even if-- and I think this is an absurd hypothetical-- there were absolutely no other possible jobs you could do, there's no coercion here if you're asked for your password and refuse and thus don't get the job.
Coercion would be the situation if, when you refused, not only did you not get the job, but they broke your kneecaps. It would have be an act that the employer threatened to do to you if you didn't comply. Your external situation cannot make it coercive.
I think this is the problem that a lot of people have-- they confuse need with right, and thus actually advocate coercion -- the coercion here is the State of Maryland which has threatened prosecution if a company violates this law.
A job is an expression of freedom of association, and people have that freedom on both ends. That is to say, the employer has the freedom to not hire people for arbitrary reasons (e.g.: programmer knows C++ but not Java, doesn't get the job.) These reasons might be stupid, but using stupid reasons is competitively disadvantageous.
By the same token, employees have the right to refuse to take a job for arbitrary reasons (I won't work anywhere that makes me write windows software, for instance.) That choice lowered my income for some years (then it had the opposite effect later.)
You have an ATM card. I mug you, and steal the card. All I need now is the PIN. I kidnap you. I ask you to give me the PIN. Are you being coerced?
You refuse to give the PIN. I threaten to hurt you. Are you being coerced now?
You refuse to give the PIN. I punch you, very very hard. You're bleeding. Are you being coerced now?
You hear my accomplice shouting "Just cut his finger off!". You see a tray with a variety of sharp knives.
[...]
At what point are you actually being coerced?
Perhaps it's just the word coercion. I'll agree that it's a poor choice. But do you deny there's a huge imbalance of power? There's a large pool of labour able to do the jobs. There are fewer jobs available. People need to work. It's that imbalance that caused many abuses of labour, some of which still happen. Unskilled women could refuse to work for less pay than men doing the same job, but they don't, because they need the work and they know that someone else is available.
At the bottom rung of the skills ladder, there are always more applicants than jobs - you have to count the "overqualified", as they will apply for those same jobs. The bargaining power of the employer in these situations vastly outweighs that of the employee.
Your diversion into coercion is fun, but irrelevant. Someone who needs a job will be at such a disadvantage that the fact that they aren't being forced at gunpoint doesn't matter. The illusion of choice is just that, an illusion.
In addition, if employers are allowed to continue these practices, they will spread irrespective of whether they're a good idea or not. Pretty soon, you don't have a choice at all. There are no companies left that don't violate your rights.
This is only the case in a poor economy (which, admittedly, we've been in for... some time now). In a booming economy, I heard fellow business owners, when I was one, complain about getting zero filled applications for advertised positions in which they mostly needed a warm body to sweep or greet customers.
Under the right set of conditions, I can see employers struggling to hire staff. However, potential candidates usually take advantage of this by demanding a better wage, overtime, favourable hours etc. Things that you would have no real qualms about opening negotiation on.
When the shoe is on the other foot; remember that a company's hiring policy is often set by someone who doesn't have to do the dirty work of actually asking the candidate themselves. The interviewer can brush it off as "stupid company policy" and, in the end, nobody takes responsibility for it. It becomes something that is just done.
States enact laws preventing employers from asking these questions for very good reasons. Most of this information can easily be obtained by accessing a persons Facebook account.
Your argument presents several hypotheticals. I would not trust a potential employer to do any of them. Not because they are evil, but because are charged with protecting the company from unwanted employees. And the definition of unwanted in that situation varies wildly from one to another.
It's good that you have integrity. People should stand up to such nonsense. But if you have a red flag on Facebook and everywhere you apply asks for your password, then you are SOL.
For background checks, frankly I believe a licensed, disinterested third party should perform them where they are necessary.
(I downvoted you because I strongly disagreed with you. Freedom of association is a poor defense for permitting discrimination, particularly where employment is concerned, IMO.)
Exactly, you don't wish to engage in intelligent discussion, you're punishing me for not being politically correct.
> Employers usually have significant power advantages
Unlike this and the other assertions you made, I actually made arguments to defend my position. What you've given here is the standard liberal ideological beliefs.
Don't worry, you're not the only one-- this is true of everyone else who responded to me.
You all chose convenience over principle, you all ignored my argument and you all gave me unintelligent answers.
Hacker News is not a place for intelligent discussion.
I expounded further here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826441
You could do with re-reading the guidelines - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - specifically:
Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
Your specific baiting played a significant part - perhaps 70% - in my decision to downvote, the other 30% was because the comment was so high on the page (it was first IIRC), and such a wrongheaded comment (by my experience, not my ideology) being afforded such prominence disturbed me.
PS: value is highest for me from HN when I ignore politicized topics like this one. But sometimes I get sucked in. Don't leave in a huff simply because of this; it's not worth it.
What if these companies asked to inspect your home before making you an offer?
What if they were asking for your medical records?
Should a company be able to do whatever it wants to current or prospective employees? My lone alternative is to "work someplace else"? Really?
Yet the people who have disagreed with me have not made arguments, mostly just drive by comments. Mostly assertion and characterization. And one person even admitted he was down voting me simply because he disagreed.
Hacker News is not a place where intelligent discussion can take place, and thus its a waste of time to participate here.
I'm tired of getting responses that aren't insightful disagreements, but vague unsupported assertions of partisanship. I'm tired of personal attacks when I make arguments and the fact that it seems most participants on HN are 20 something and very uneducated about the world. (which means you can't' refer to things that should be well known--like the fact that Apple got a license from Xerox for the inventions such as the mouse et al.)
Hacker News is a waste of time, and its getting blocked in my /etc/hosts file for now.