Of course over the past few years we have all heard that
individuals have lost job opportunities to other applicants due to what they
had posted on their personnel Facebook pages. Employers would “stalk”
potential employees and see if they could dig up any dirt before hiring the
individual.1 At the
time this was considered a huge breach of privacy that breaks the barrier
between work and play. We should all have the ability to keep our work lives
separate from our personal lives. It now seems that employers weren’t satisfied
in only vetting out perspectives employees secretly and are now directly asking
for access to individual’s accounts. So now they would not merely have access
to what the public can view but also have the ability to edit and view private
information on someone’s account. Not only this but they not limiting
themselves to perspective employees, they are now asking for passwords from
individuals who have already been hired.
However there is good news. Facebook has come out to protect us
from this breach of our privacy. This is partially to keep users on their site
but also to help the individuals involved. Facebook openly warned that there
could be legal ramifications should any information from a Facebook account be
released. As for future directions, they have also confirmed that they are in
talks with policy makers as to if there is any way to go after the known
employers who asked for passwords. This to me is the first time I have ever
heard of a company going out of their way to protect their users. Of course if
this breach were also a breach of Facebook’s user agreement this action would
seem less thoughtful. However this doesn’t seem to be the case Facebook is
actually going out of their way to allow their service to be fun and carefree.
You can read more about what’s going on in links 2 and 3 below.
Many other news sites have also chosen to cover this story as well.
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