Checking your employment history is standard practice. The fact that you had to provide a pay stub typically means they weren’t able to verify your previous employer for some reason or another. Was it some big secret you worked there?
Yeah.. Some genius at the Department of Prison Goons.
Like it or not, the concept of “privacy” is changing. Companies may not have the right to demand your Facebook account, but rest assured they are mining the web looking for whatever information they can gleen to help market to you better.
Do you really think Facebook is worth billions because it lets college students post drunk pictures of each other or share every inane thought? It’s worth billions because it is a massive database of all the likes and dislikes of a network of millions and millions of people and all their demographic information.
Aside from the fact that I have the same problems with this that most of you have, there are some others I have. Where does it stop, for one. Do I have to turn over the login information for my e-mail account? What about accounts I’ve abandoned or forgotten about? Are they going to have the right to examine my social media accounts going forward? Are they going to change my password as a form of discipline if I do something they don’t like? Can I be disciplined if I change the password and don’t tell them?
And one that we should all be asking is whether the company is willing to accept responsibility for its actions WRT our social media accounts. Are they going to accept liability if my user names and passwords are compromised? What about protection from bored employees who access my accounts for their own amusement? What about rumors that start based on information gleaned from a private Facebook post? Are they willing to respect my friends’ confidentiality?
Finally, by whose standards are my postings going to be judged? Objective standards laid out by written company policy? Or will I be judged according to the whims of the person reading the account?
This is bad news. I don’t think any reasonable company would demand that I hand over a written journal. I don’t see where they have the right to demand that I hand over account information to sites that are essentially the same thing.
I don’t use my real name on FB so they can’t find me if I lie and say I don’t have a FB. Plus its private and won’t show up on FB searches. I’ll trash the company and join gangs all I want in my personal time!
Which is one of the reasons I’m here under a pseudonym, my own Facebook postings are boring, and my more alternative and questionable “friends” are not friended. However, my Linked In profile under my real name looks awesome.
This troubles me, not because of the fact that organization are trying to do it, but because it’s so easy to get the wrong information.
If you Google my name and “Facebook”, you’ll find a whole bunch of profiles written by people with not a lot of common sense. Thing is, none of them are mine. How, though, does an potential employer who’s never seen me know that? Now, as a researcher who looks for people all the time on the internet, I’d be able to quickly discredit the “imposters”. HR people…well, I can hear them say already, “That guy looks about the same age as the person we’re looking for, and lives in the same city…it must be him.” If that guy posted loads of pictures of getting into questionable activities, well, I’m screwed, and there’s not a damn lot I can do about it.
And, truth be told, a lot of information on the internet is just plain wrong. Several times I’ve researched people whose internet data picture is incorrect. Sometimes their data is mixed up with someone else’s with the same or a similar name. Once I was researching someone with a name which was very similar to a high-ranking politician, and one site had career information with that guy’s resume and the politician’s resume mixed up…so, according to that site, that person “held” a top White House staff position at the same time he was allegedly running a small business in California. Other times data doesn’t get updated correctly so you get an incomplete or obsolete collection of data, or something gets entered incorrectly into a site. So you get the same person with differently-spelled first and last names, apparently living in three different houses on the same street, married to a person who also has two or three different names, sometimes with different ages…you get the point. Again, there’s not a damn lot you can do about it. Petitioning the website to fix your information will get you nowhere, and anyway the likelihood is that someone’s going to cache the old data and post it up somewhere else.
Bottom line is, there’s a lot of chaff on the internet, and when places do data mining we have no idea whether they’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And if there’s wrong info on the internet there’s nothing you can do about it. Sleep well, I guess.
The company wouldn’t be violate Facebooks TOS - you would. They can ask, the issue is when you give it to them. You are the one who agreed to the TOS on the account.
Likewise, asking you to violate their terms of service is unethical, but it isn’t illegal
And violating TOS (or discrimination) aren’t criminal acts, they are covered under civil law.
It may not be illegal, but it’s unethical, and no legitimate company should be requiring employees to commit unethical acts, and it doesn’t seem right that you should lose or be denied a job for refusing to do so.
First, the Fourth Amendment does nothing to prevent me from tapping your phone or opening your mail. It prevents the federal government from doing so, and when applied to the states via operation of the Fourteenth Amendment, it also prevents state governments from doing so. But it has nothing to do with private actors.
Second, even if a state government did this, it would not offend the Fourth Amendment, because it involves consent. If the state asks you to sign a form authorizing them to tap your phone and open your mail, and you do so, you cannot then complain that their actions violated the Fourth Amendment.
First, it seems clear that the actions would indeed violate Facebook’s Terms of Service. Section3, item 5 says, “You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.” Item 11 says, “You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement.” Taken together, these two would seem to forbid the practice we’re discussing.
However, these are contractual terms between you and Facebook. Multimegacorp is not a party to this agreement, and so they are not violating any terms themselves; they are merely asking you to do so.
This is not a crime, at least as far as I can think of. However, it might be a tort - a civil wrong.
There is a cause of action called tortious interference with a contract – basically, the idea is that it’s wrong for you to induce someone else to breach his contract with a third party.
The problem with this theory, at least in my state, is that I think that when the contract is terminable at will, tortious interference requires that defendant use “improper methods” for interfering with the contract. “Improper” means that the methods employed were either criminal or independently tortious, or involved violence, threats or intimidation, bribery, unfounded litigation, fraud, misrepresentation or deceit, defamation, duress, undue influence, misuse of inside or confidential information, or breach of a fiduciary relationship – none of which are in play here.
I draw all of that from a case styled Dunn, McCormack & MacPherson v. Connolly, 708 S.E.2d 867 (Va 2011). But it’s not my area of law, so I might well be missing some key point of analysis. I defer to someone who knows the civil side of law to provide a better answer.
What if you do it under duress? It seems that a job interviewer from a company where you wish to be employed can ask you to acquiesce to a lot of things, and if you do, you cannot deny there isn’t some pressure, real or imagined, that may skew a person’s actions
This kind of thing really irritates the daylights out of me…namely because about 7 years ago, when Slim was just a baby, I was fired from a good job (well, good for ME job anyway) because the director of HR found my MySpace page and decided he didn’t like the language (there were only two pics–one of myself from the shoulders up and one of a ceramic salt shaker in the shape of Porky Pig’s girlfriend Petunia). When I contacted several different law offices, in an attempt to get a ballpark figure as to how much it would cost me to fight his decision to fire me, nobody wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. I don’t know if it’s because we’re a “you can fire anybody for any reason you deem fit” state or if it was because I didn’t want MONEY. All I wanted was an apology from HR and my job back.
Could it be argued that giving you a job if you comply is bribery?
Also, seeing as the company likely has a Facebook page of their own for marketting, and the person hiring you likely has a Facebook and/or will be giving it to someone who does, couldn’t it be argued that they were violating the EULA directly?
Duress typically doesn’t exist when the only pressure is, “We won’t offer you a job if you don’t do this.”
For example, an employer that demanded sex in return for a job would be liable under all sorts of employment actions, but most likely would not be guilty of rape, since that’s not the sort of duress that would overbear the will and create a rape.
I answered the ‘duress’ idea above. You don’t have a particular right to the job, so they’re denying it to you isn’t actionable.
So far as I’m aware, there’s no generic crime of bribery. For example, if I wish to be seated immediately at a table with a view, and slip the maitre’d a folded fifty, there is no crime in play. Bribery statutes typically refer to paying a public officer holder or government official in exchange for some consideration.
Answered the bribery idea above, but this second point is, in my view, pretty solid. If the company has a Facebook page, they would seem to be violating Facebook’s terms by this request. Unfortunately, the enforcement of that violation is between the company and Facebook; as a third party, you have way to demand that Facebook take some or any action to protect its own TOS.
It seems like FaceBook would be willing to attempt legal action on this. If a lot of employers started doing this, FB could lose users or their users could be less open about providing the information that is FB’s real product.
Facebook itself has stepped up to the plate, warning employers not to do this:
That "… shutting down applications that abuse their privileges …” that Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan warns of presumbly means yanking the employer’s Facebook account.
