Employers Banned From Asking For Social Media Passwords In California
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Regardless, I bet that any predictive relationship between willingness to divulge a Facebook password in an interview and the ability to perform adequately as a software engineer is weak at best. To me, an employer who doesn't understand that shows poor capacity for unbiased reasoning.
Easy examples off the top of my head:
- You cultivate a profile almost like a garden, knowing that one day an employer is going to demand to see it
- You started one, but don't use it
You need a job and are given to believe that you won't get the one you're interviewing for if you don't hand over your password.
People regularly do all kinds of demeaning things because employers ask/demand them to.
You need a job to pay for those things.
With that said, I definitely understand why an applicant would be offended by the question. In fact, I would hope they are! I guess the second test is seeing if they understand the logic of such a question then convincing him or her that I don't conduct myself this way.
In the right hands, this is a great tool, but in the wrong hands, it is a disaster.
Secondly, it would be setting the bar way too low. I don't appreciate being congratulated for not being an idiot. Someone congratulating me and actually being impressed of that fact makes me think less of that person.
A pretty bad start to a supposedly long relationship, if you ask me.
What if your prospective employee asked you to sign a NDA with regards to any personal information he may or may not reveal, before the interview started. How would you view them then?
Reason I ask is there be companies that will find away around law's and will ask you to sign a NDA during the interview stages and this is accepted in general. Does focus the aspect of what happens at work stays at work and what happens at home stays at home, somewhat.
Wouldn't it be equivalent to divulging that and so much more?
Likewise asking for social media password is pretty dangerous even if it's not specifically illegal because it opens you up to claims that you found something on the account that revealed some protected class status.
(And, sadly, Title VII, the federal anti-discrimination law, does not protect against sexual orientation. In many states it is perfectly legal to fire people for being gay. A bill to fix this situation has been stalled in Congress for nearly two decades.)
It is very common for confused employers to claim it is illegal, but as eli described this is an oversimplification and is not actually true.
Don't get me wrong, it is a very bad idea to ask these questions. But it is not illegal, strictly speaking.
Though of course you should still avoid asking questions about someone's protected status!
A quick google finds two examples:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/education/07marquette.html...;
http://www.newschannel5.com/story/13620898/coach-loses-job-a...
The federal law that could fix this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A... I would imagine if you pull up the testimony supporting this bill you would find many more examples.
Is it possible that the federal laws have had a normalising affect - the different states may have different laws but majority of companies simply go with federal law as they probably don't even know different.
I would be interested in state by state breakdowns of discrimination suits and see if they compare to each other or uk in any useful way. Google not helping here or my brain too dead.
"As used in this chapter, “social media” means an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but not limited to, videos, still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations."
That's actually a little tricky when it comes to SaaS - if an employee set up the PagerDuty / S3 / Basecamp / what-have-you account under their own name it might be slightly awkward to take the account over should they leave the company.
Not a huge deal - with discipline, those services should be set up using a company-specific account - but it does suggest that SaaS services should make sure they provide a "transfer this to another user" feature.
And even more happy to draw a lawsuit out for months when a disgruntled ex-employee refuses to hand over the password for such a service with reference to this law.
But, hey, there are several single pieces of anecdotal evidence, certainly it's irrelevant that it's election season, so all is good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15347868
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jan/12/books.newme...
(the chap was later re-employed)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19010842
I just tell students that social media are 'public speech' and that they have to think...
The US patents system seems pretty odd as well mind you.
Actually, he was offered his job back, but didn't take it up. It's unclear if the offer was before or after he won an appeal against Waterstone's dismissal (it is not unusual to get an offer for reinstatement but still run the employment tribunal process to win compensation for the dismissal). But in the meantime he'd gotten an offer from Forbidden Planet to run their blog, and apparently reached a settlement with Waterstone's instead.
As far as I can tell, he still runs the Forbidden Planets blog (as well as his own at http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/ ).
The EU Data Protection (i.e. privacy) law means that if you're collecting personal information (in any way, not just computer), then you have to:
(a) Explain why you are asking for it, and you have to give a legitimate reason why you want to know it. You cannot store information you cannot explain why you need it
(b) You then have to store the personal information in a secure manner. So you can just ask for access to someone's Facebook account and then share it around the office.
(c) The personal data requested must be proportionate to what you want to do. I doubt "tell us everything about your social life" is acceptable for just hiring a person for a job.
(there might be other reasons why this is against data protection law, but I can't think of any off the top of my head)
Not to mention the much stronger employee rights (e.g. you cannot not hire someone based on family status, sexuality, etc.), and it would be much harder to prove you didn't use that information if you accessed it. (Employee protection is stronger in EU, none of this "at will" crap)
So banning the practice really just serves to codify what anyone with common sense was working out in their head anyway.
(Not certain if your post implied that European companies are more privacy-minded, just wanted to point out that that's debatable).
If anything, the UK CVs stand out among European CVs as being much more like the US resumes, i.e. less invasive. Back to the context of this thread, for the parent to point to Europe as a protector of privacy for the job seeker is disingenuous.
All it takes is one person to sue for discrimination because their profile says they're gay / disabled / pregnant / a veteran / etc, and the employer has no way of proving that wasn't the reason for passing them over.
This is the same reason smart employers will never ask you questions about those topics in an interview. It's too hard to defend accusations of discrimination if you happen to discover that the candidate is in a legally protected class.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3790378
Re-reading those comments is very interesting in the context of this legislation.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-pas...
http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Montana-City-Asks-J...
One of the danger signs used to be debt held by people in the defense industry. Someone paying off the debts for some secrets was modus operandi.
I mean, if you want to see facebook/timeline information - that's the simplest way (assuming they even have non-public profiles to start with). Twitter is pretty much open season.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/27/facebook-password-p...
That said, while workers have rights so do employers (this is not one of them) but being able to run your business without being unfairly accused of something seems to be what the reps where arguing against; specifically that what the dems proposed would have enabled the FCC to overreach their authority. Or are you like a big fan of the FCC having even more power?
But no, let's get a few more redundant and/or downright pointless laws on the books, we're not spending anywhere near enough on lawyers yet.
Scholarships and universities is where there might be a case for the law. I would like to see some real examples first though where current law does not already stops this for scholarships/universities.
The Dem position was stated by Treasury Secretary Geitner - "No, we don't have a plan. We just know that we don't like yours."
Even if they're equally bad in total, they're bad in different ways and that can matter.
Seriously. This whole idea was the brink of draconian tyranny. When things like this started transpiring five and ten years ago, I immediately withdrew from ALL social media websites, and vowed never to abide by real identity demands on any social website that intended to publish it publicly.
I swore to myself that I would debate any rotten hiring goon into the ground, if I was ever asked such a question during an interview. Not that I would even want to stay on at such a work place, but just to see if they were smart enough to tolerate my brand of dissent. If inflexible, I would instantly walk out, and threaten (an empty threat) to sue.
It's not just about the invasion of privacy an and employers pervasive, stifling surveillance of subordinates. What integrity is there to a Facebook account? Nothing more than an e-mail address is required to create one. E-mail addresses are free and plentiful. More e-mail addresses could potentially be created than addresses in the entire IPv6 number space, and by corollary, so too with social media accounts.
What recourse is there for me to prevent malicious individuals from continually creating fake accounts in my name? Do I have endlessly deep pockets and the spare time it takes to chase down trolls, sue for libel and slander? But how many people have the time to spam and flood the internet with anything they want? What's to stop even me for creating 10,000 fake accounts in my own name? And in doing so, would I forfeit my chances at certain jobs? What absolute twaddle.