“Could You Enter Your Username and Password, Please?” Employers’ new trick with Facebook

Would you give out the keys to your house in order to get a job? Would you let someone go through boxes of personal belongings, mail and pictures? For most people, the answer is an unequivocal “no.” Yet an increasing number of people are facing a question similar to this in their quest to find a job during these difficult economic times. Over the past few weeks, increased attention has been paid to the issue of employers asking applicants for their Facebook login information during job interviews, sparking a debate on whether interviewers are justified in asking, and whether interviewees should be willing to give up their privacy.

Internet privacy wars have been well-documented in the past.
Given the business models of social networking sites, which typically rely on using troves of user information to attract advertisers, there’s a clear tradeoff between ease of communication and the right to privacy, something that most users today have come to accept. Users have also become more adept at taking advantage of privacy settings to ward off unwanted posted photos, the release of embarrassing information, or even to entirely cut off the outside world from their content, but the issue posed by employers asking for access to your accounts creates a whole different problem.

What has led many to increase the protection of their online privacy results from the dangers that come from having information out there for anyone—especially employers—to see. After years of being advised by an older and wiser generation, anyone who’s in college today and has a shred of common sense knows about the importance of censoring himself or herself online. All of that gets thrown out, though, if potential employers have the right to dig through your information. While Facebook itself recognizes that the practice is against its guidelines on use and spoils the assumptions of privacy and security that users expect on the site, there hardly seems to be any legal ground that can be taken if people are voluntarily giving up their credentials. An FCC reform bill with an amendment to ban the practice was shot down recently in Congress. Connecticut’s own Senator Richard Blumenthal has announced that he is in the process of writing a bill to ban the practice, and has appealed to the Department of Justice to investigate it, but it is still unclear what the timeframe would be like on these measures.

It’s obviously easy to see all of this adding up to nothing more than another fringe privacy-hawk issue, an inevitable consequence of what happens when the real world collides with the digital, but it’s also legitimately scary to think about the types of problems that may lead to one giving up their information in less than comfortable circumstances. Senator Blumenthal cites a law passed in 1988 banning polygraph testing in job interviews, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, as his rationale behind writing his bill. What’s similar about these acts by interviewers is that is that there is an air of coercion in them. When there’s money at stake, especially in the face of bills, debt and everything else that adds stress to our lives, there’s probably many things you can make someone “voluntarily” do that turn out to be a whole lot less voluntary.

As college students, individuals being groomed to soon enter the job market, we might consider the state of the workforce our first priority when we get there. Everyone, to some degree, is worried about the prospects for work in the future, whether we’re looking for a job three months or three years down the road. Couple this with the fact that we’re going to school—and not a cheap one—at a time when national student debt is higher than ever before while the national employment rate is only beginning to slowly tick up, and it’s easy to see how desperate these times could get. Of course some students at Conn won’t be faced with taking jobs under uncomfortable circumstances, but others definitely will.

Speaking with friends, peers and faculty around campus about the Facebook situation, and about whether they would give out their privacy to get a job, there seemed to be one common thread. Most at first gave a resounding “no,” and talked about how they would never feel comfortable working for a company that didn’t respect their privacy. Some talked about how it was bad enough that employers were already encroaching on the border between online personal life and real-world public life, and how employers had no right to access and judge private photos, friend’s lists and messages meant to be shared only between two pairs of eyes. However, when reminded of the state of the economy and unemployment, most also began to pull back from their remarks a bit, and take a more realistic look at what they would do.

Nobody wants to be that loser who spends the year after graduation living in the room they were meant to vacate as a permanent resident the day they packed up for college. Nobody wants to spend what’s meant to be the best four years of their lives becoming a failure because they can’t hold down a job. These are common truths, facts we can all agree on. In order to help make sure that no one among us degrades themselves in the face of these facts, we all have to be able to take matters like this very seriously, support the right to online privacy and initiatives that protect it, and say no to our personal lives being invaded even before we’re asked the question, “could you enter your username and password, please?” •