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
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.
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.