Bosses ask job seekers for FB passwords

SEATTLE: In their efforts to vet job applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead are asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation”.

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates.

But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that do not ask for passwords have taken other steps – such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview.

Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter responded to repeated requests for comment.