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California
moves to stop employers demanding Facebook passwords
The move is
part of a wave of legislative activity to block the practice
By Cameron
Scott
May 10,
2012 08:41 PM ET13 Comments . What’s this?
IDG News Service
- The California assembly passed a bill on Thursday that prevents
employers
from demanding job applicants’ passwords for accounts on Facebook or
other
social networking sites.
The bill
passedunanimously and will now head to the state senate. Similar
legislation
was introduced Thursday in the U.S. Congress.
The
legislative moves follow reports that employers have demanded passwords
for
social sites from job applicants, demanded a walk-through of the
content on
those sites or insisted applicants accept a friend request from a
member of
staff.
It’s
unclear how common the practice really is, but according to Nora Campos
[cq],
the Democrat who introduced the California bill, there are 129 cases
before the
National Labor Relations Board involving improper use of social
networking
accounts by employers.
The
practice began to draw public attention in March when a New York
statistician
disclosed that a prospective employer had demanded his Facebook login
as part
of its screening process. Facebook responded by making it a violation
of its
terms of service to solicit or share account passwords.
“As a user,
you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and
communications
just to get a job.A And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to
worry that
your private information or communications will be revealed to someone
you
don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is
looking
for a job,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy offer for policy, wrote
in a
blog post.
The American
Civil Liberties Union has supported legislation to ban the practice.
Chris
Conley [cq], a technology and civil liberties policy attorney at the
ACLU of
Northern California, said social networks have “vast amounts of
information”
about individuals that they should not have to share each time they
apply for a
job.
Bills
blocking employer use of job applicants’ logins are being considered in
six
other U.S. states and have passed in two.
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