Would You Reveal Your Facebook Password to get a Job?

When Justin Bassett interviewed for a job, there was one question that caught him by surprise: the interviewer asked for his Facebook password!

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

"It's akin to requiring someone's house keys," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it "an egregious privacy violation."

Would you share your Facebook password to get a job? Link


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No. When I accept a job it's about agreeing to perform specific duties at a specific time for a specific amount of compensation. That is all. My private life, my interests and my friendships have nothing whatsoever to do with my employer or their business. My life is not going to center entirely around my employer's corporate philosophy. Employers have no business noodling around in people's personal lives, only in their professional lives when they're on the company clock.
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Apparently I don't understand Facebook, or I don't use it the way other people do. What would an employer learn about you with your password that they wouldn't learn just looking at your Facebook profile? As I understand it, the only thing they need a password for is to change or delete your page. You know, like if someone wanted the password to my blog.

So when I first encountered this controversy, I figured maybe employers didn't understand how Facebook worked, but maybe its me. Do they really demand control over your site, or do they just want to monitor what you post? If that's it, sure, look at my site, but someone should explain that you don't need a password fr that, just an account and maybe a friend link.

If an employer demanded control over a site I owned, that would be fighting time. But if I were desperate for a job, I might delete the site.
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Responding to that request would also be in violation Facebook's terms of service, 4.8: "You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account."
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After reading about this yesterday I made an examination of my facebook postings in my timeline over the entire 4 years I've been using it. I found absolutely nothing I would be embarassed about, and yet I would still refuse unless the job required a security clearance. Companies that want to vet prospective employees need to find a way to do so that doesn't invade privacy. The current job market may favor the employer over the prospective employee in terms of bargaining positions, but the terms of any job should include a right to personal privacy. I won't give that up.
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That's insane.

The company he was interviewing for is clearly disreputable. I work for a web dev compnay, and know many people who work in IT and specifically in web-oriented jobs, and no employer has ever, ever, ever asked for passwords to their personal pages.

I don't care how plum the job market gets for employers, if they're asking for access to your personal information before they've even decided to hire you, there's something super fishy going on there.
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