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Comment by mfringel | Hacker News Reader

Your comment appears to be saying that it's morally reasonable to coerce the desperate. Allow me to explain my train of thought:

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.

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If seeing an applicant's Facebook profile is important to employers, then the market wage for an applicant who says "yes" is higher than that of an applicant who says "no". Based on that, allowing people to say "yes", even when they're doing so for lack of another good option, lets them make more money than they would otherwise make. Banning them from saying "yes" prevents them from capturing that higher wage.

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.

How the heck does it follow that the market wage is higher for those who say yes? What sort of mental gymnastics even get you to that point? You are making a big assertion with absolutely no evidence here, back up your statement with even a tiny fraction of a fact please.

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.

Whether or not employers are inherently coercive depends on your political/philosophical views behind wage labor. It's a big topic, and not one we're going to reach a consensus on in a Hacker News comment thread. Socialists tend to view wage labor as inherently coercive (using the pejorative term "wage slavery"), while capitalists generally view employment as a valid contractual relationship.

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).

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