Your employer might ask you for your Facebook password when you graduate and eventually get a job, just so you know.
I found out this information, and I couldn’t believe it. There’s no reason for them to get my password, I thought. If my profile has decent privacy settings and none of my posts are visible unless you’re friends with me, why should my employer need to know what I’m posting?
And not only do they have access to what I’m posting, but they have access to all of my private messages, and they can see which pages I moderate, and they can see with whom I am friends.
They can see which groups I have joined, and what I have posted in both open and closed ones.
Funny, they never needed to know this information before the internet, did they?
Did they ask people to bring their mail into work for screening? Did they ask for people’s planners and address books and photo albums?
Maybe I’m just remembering history wrong, and correct me if I am, but I don’t recall hearing about that in any stories my parents have told me about the way things were in the bygone Post Office era.
They didn’t need to know that information back then because it wasn’t publicly available to everyone, you say. Neither are my private messages. Neither is anything in my profile.
The only things you can see are my profile picture, my networks and my gender if you’re not friends with me.
I understand employers wanting to do due diligence in an age where what you post is never fully deleted.
I understand them wanting to snoop around and see if the person they’re hiring is smart enough to untag themselves from pictures of them partying and doing things of dubious legality, or at the very least, smart enough to use privacy settings.
That makes total sense, and if the person has enabled proper security settings and they can’t get in to their profile, I think the employer should accept that outcome and leave it at that.
Like I said earlier, I don’t see how my having a Facebook page should give any employer the idea that they have a license to make my employment contingent on letting them read my private messages.
Next they’ll be asking to read your personal email and your text messages, because you could theoretically accidentally forward damaging things to people on those, or because people could screenshot them and post them other places too.
The weirdest part about this is that I can’t think of a real way that this is even illegal.
It’s technically voluntary, they’re not trying to take your data to sell it or anything, they just want to know what you’re saying — even what you’re saying to your best friend at 2:00 in the morning when you’re coming home from getting drunk Taco Bell.
It feels ethically wrong somehow, but really, I don’t think it’s illegal.
Now, I’m not advocating for a law against this or anything, and if push came to shove, I’d probably give them my password if I had no other options. But the corporate fear of bad publicity needs to be reined in.
These big firms need to understand that while they have a pretty good basis for asking to see what’s publicly available on the internet, they don’t have much ground to stand on to request protected information.
Of course they can offer employment with the requirement that you hand over all of your passwords, but they have to understand that they’re not going to get the best people applying for those jobs, because our generation largely sees that as a huge invasion of privacy and an unnecessary breach of the already very flimsy work/life barrier.
Alexandra Williamson is a senior accountancy major from Frisco, Texas. Follow her on Twitter @alyxwi.
