They have no legal authority. They're just a social networking site. It's good enough they said SOMETHING about it.

Employers are playing on the unemployment numbers by becoming more and more draconian in their requests...

I'd tell my employer to fuck off before i'd give them that info...

would NOT give any employer my Facebook account, and most likely would create a pseudo front account that I would not use, and give them that if push came to force, however, I really wonder about the legality of these requests

Are they going to start asking what forums of social sites you belong to? Sounds so similar to the days of mccarthy, "are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party."

What a real messed up country this is becoming

at what I do (Architecture / Design / Construction). An employer who wants to check my credit, my FB postings, or have me pee in a cup can go to hell. I am lucky to be self-employed. But the afore mentioned issues are definitely a big part of WHY I am self employed. Furthemore, Clients who don't support my right to equal protection in the form of same-sex marriage can find themselves another Architect.

Have I lost Clients on occassion? Yes. Am I less financially wealthy than I might be if I didn't have these requirements? Probably. DO I sleep well at night? Yes! Do I take advantage of other people or allow then to take advantage of me? Hell no.

And most important of all, am I a happy, productive, honorable member of society?
Yes, I am

I do design and writing..and flat out refuse to give anyone bodily fluids or credit info

I didn't get on FB for years and years because of this concern, then decided WTF, I'm not looking for a different job so not likely to have problems.

If something happened, and I had to find a new job, I'd do what you suggest and open up a new email account on Yahoo or some other generic place, make a new FB account and not add any friends or info at all. What my friends or family is doing is none of their damn business and if they push it, well, then, that's no company I want to support.

where rogue data miners post job opportunities on monster.com (and elsewhere, I'm sure) and get applicants' info, including SSN. This sounds like a similar deal, only worse in some ways.

I don't use FB anyway because of privacy concerns, but if any employer tried to me to cough up this kind of info I'd laugh at them.

If I were an applicant and had a FaceBook account and was asked to surrender my password, could I request such information from the interviewer? The HR department? Managers and supervisors? The CEO?

At what level in the hierarchy does this become a "no-no?"

I believe disseminating your password is generally against Terms of Service of practically all web sites.

Then the job interviewer takes over the keyboard. If you refuse, you are shown the door.

But it is an understatement to say there are a lot of people who are desperate for a job.

But this was not my point. I know how employers are avoiding possible ramifications of demanding Facebook login IDs and passwords. I just wanted to share that information, hoping to contribute to the discourse.

I don't have a Facebook account. There's probably about a dozen of us left on earth.

So they have to settle for de facto.

+1 for historical context...and your Lorraine Cross avatar.

Maybe they won't take the ultimate step of repealing the 13th amendment and allowing one person to legally own another, but their assaults on workers' rights are aimed at making working conditions as close to slavery as the Constitution will allow.

The reality is that employers will continue to exact whatever information they want from prospective candidates as long as they have more candidates than positions. The only way to combat this is to legislate what an employer may legally request of an employee as part of the hiring process.

Whatever that employer may want to do outside of their engagement with the prospective employee such as a background check, hiring a private investigator to ferret out information, etc. is probably something there is little anyone can do to prevent.

But there needs to be some "leveling" of the playing field between employers and employees. While I am not a big fan of unions (having been a member for 10 years), at least employees had a formal process to influence employer behavior. Today it is the wild west with the employer having all the power.

Corporations constantly put their employees through compliance training, which among other things, schools the employee on what signifies "private" information and what is eligible for disclosure and not eligible according to federal laws. Pretty much all personal information, such as account numbers, passwords, etc, is secure and classified.

So what I'm hearing is that "Those rules protect and only apply to US. YOU . . . not so much"??

Isn't that kind of violating their own policy when they ask for applicant's passwords?

I'd consider them an untrustworthy security risk.

Wouldn't an HR staffer actually think that the person who's more in line with a company's compliance standards and the acts that regulate these standards be the better candidate?

…would seem like a black mark to me. Would such a person honor his agreements with the company?

Of course Facebook didn't exist when I started my current job (I'll have to mention that to my daughter - life without Facebook).

Last edited Tue Feb 26, 2019, 10:17 PM - Edit history (1)

Giving out your login is as much a violation of Facebook as it is of you!!!


rocktivity

this. Seems like the GOP wants total control over every single American. Freedom my ass. These mother effers don't know what freedom mean.

The idea of Facebook as protector of privacy is almost farcical, given their own track record.

Where will they stop? If someone sends me a personal email through Facebook, these days it's no different than a letter mailed to me. Why does an employer get to access it?

Sure my checking account transactions might be interesting to my employer, but why would they get to access it.

Just because something might give an employer information, it doesn't mean they deserve to have that level of access.

I am in mid-level management. I unfriended all my coworkers and bosses when I learned that people over me were going through people's profiles and saving screenshots of what they considered suspicious, inflamatory or otherwise note-worthy. One of the people who work under me was called into our boss to explain why she posted "TGIF"...the boss felt that such a comment indicated that the employee was not grateful for her job.

I like my company, but things like this make me think about moving on sometimes.

Think it's just safer that way. Not aware of any searches being done by my co., but why take a chance?

lol

If an employer asked me for anything strictly personal, I would sue for discrimination. It's none of the God damned business what I do on Facebook or my free time...you have to be fucking kidding me?

If they asked everyone to disclose the information . . . where's the discrimination?

or some legal gordian knot rhetoric like that.

Facebook's idea of "the right thing to do" is whatever suits them, not their customers.

they, like most corporations, are just trying to keep their asses out of the sling.

We sort of have one, but only inferred from the other rights; so it's esp. vague, and has been chipped away during the last couple of decades.

Like our other rights, it would of course be subject to balancing against other rights and considerations.