Are Employers Going too Far?

This week blog is in a way ties to last weeks. To refresh everyone’s mind Last week blog “The Enemy from Within” dealt with employees being the threat to employers as oppose to hacker and viruses. While researching this week blog I found articles that dealt with employers asking for social media account information from potential employees for screening purposes. Are employers looking for potential trouble makers before they are hired? What happened to the old methods, references, credit report, and background checks? Are employers trying to find more cost effective measures?

According to Alison Doyle from About.com this is a practice more commonly known as “Shoulder Surfing”, and that at the time this article which was written on August 11 of this year there were no laws that specifically protected the social networking privacy of job seekers from sneaky employers. This is now changing. This past Thursday September 27, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349 prohibiting universities and employers from demanding e-mail and social media passwords from prospective employees (Kerr, 2012).

This billed was authored by assembly member, Nora Campos. According her office there are more than 100 cases currently before the National Labor Relations Board that involve employers workplace policies around social media. According to the article Facebook has also said it has experienced and increase in reports of employers seeking to gain inappropriate access to people’s account.

Campos is not the only politician taking notice, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut plans to propose legislation to ban employers from requesting access to Facebook accounts as a term of employment (Cooper, 2012).

As a reader I don’t even know what to think, this is such a violation of privacy and security. I think HR managers or who ever thought that this policy was legal missed the 101 class of policy making when they were in school. The last week chapter (Chapter 4) clearly outlines some basic rules:

• Policy should never conflict with law
• Policy must be able to stand up in court if challenged
• Policy must be properly supported and administered

So it is obvious these employers fail to follow the first two steps, these employers not only are violating the invasion of privacy of rules by the ACLU, but major network’s terms of service, furthermore these companies which have gained access to the social media account can be liable for any content posted therein (Buck, 2012) . Mrs. Buck states that if the prospective employee posted admission of guilt to a crime, his or her employer may find itself legally vulnerable.

I say employers need to continue with traditional methods of screening their perspective employees without violating their rights to privacy. Now, once employed by all mean they can snoop all the want is their right as an employer to make sure resources are used appropriately and is not a violation of privacy because employees have agreed to it.

References

Buck, S. (2012, April 5). What’s at Stake When Employers Ask for Social Media Passwords? [INFOGRAPHIC]. Retrieved September 30, 2012, from Mashable

Cooper, C. (2012, March 24). Fork over your Facebook log-on or you don't get hired. What? Retrieved September 30, 2012, from Cnet

Doyle, A. (2012, August 11). Employers Asking for Facebook Passwords. Retrieved September 30, 2012, from About.com

Kerr, D. (2012, September 27). Calif. law passed to halt employer snooping on social media. Retrieved September 30, 2012, from Cnet

Whitman, M., & Mattford, H. (2010). Why Policy? In M. Whitman, & H. Mattford, Management of Information System (p. 119). Boston: Course Technology.