Want This Job? Give Us Your Google and Facebook Passwords, Please
This is just plain crazy. Make sure you go see the form — if you were applying for a job in Bozeman, MT, you’d also have to disclose and give them edit access to all of your online life.
Background checks are one thing (and an overused thing at that), but giving up your passwords to Facebook? MySpace? YouTube? Whatever can this accomplish? And this:
The local TV station picked up the story and, according to city attorney Greg Sullivan they don’t look at, “the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things,” and maintains that no one has removed their name from consideration because of the requirement.
This is BS. Of course they look. But whatever is the point?
Tags: Privacy
I guess this kind of thing can happen when jobs are scarce. When they aren’t I suspect people would flee such an intrusive company. Why would they want your password as opposed to your username? Are they going to change your content in some way?
The form over at The Consumerist seems to want both your user name and your password.
From Facebook Terms Of Service:
” You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account. ”
I expect all the services have similar terms.
Up yours, Bozeman!
Perhaps those whose on-line activity is under a name that is readily traceable to a real name and address cannot comprehend the paranoia of a few who lurk in anonymity.
How many letters and op ed pieces are published under a pseudonym?
Should the Internet degenerate to the status of anonymous scrawls on public toilet stalls, messages that are often prima facie evidence of a frustration that borders on sickness?
Perhaps, when ‘thought police’ acting in the name of some vague ‘fairness’ or ‘diversity’ begin to censor talk radio and then the Internet, those who question the Elegance of Dear Leader’s New Clothes may be obliged to take the samizdat and pirate radio approach to voicing dissent.