Michigan Makes It Illegal To Ask For Employees' Facebook Logins 132
An anonymous reader writes "Michigan joins Maryland as a state where employers may not ask employees or job applicants to divulge login information for Facebook and other social media sites. From the article: 'Under the law, employers cannot discipline employees or decline to hire job applicants because they do not give them access information, including user names, passwords, login information, or "other security information that protects access to a personal internet account," according to the bill. Universities and schools cannot discipline or fail to admit students if they do not give similar information.' There is one exception, however: 'However, accounts owned by a company or educational institution, such as e-mail, can be requested.'"
Moot for me (Score:2, Insightful)
The law is moot for me.
I would never EVER tolerate being asked this question. If asked, the interview would be over. If they were half-sane enough to retract the question and apologize, the apology would not be accepted.
If any employers want my advice (and admittedly, they usually don't), they would fire anyone who thought this was part of something they should know.
On the plus side, I don't have a facebook account - but I'd still walk out of any interview where it came up. Anyone who thinks this is at all possible to ask is not someone I'd be willing to work for.
Re:However.... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is outright illegal in my country. Don't you Americans have any basic right to privacy?
Anyway, I'd never hire anyone so stupid as to give me their passwords. Would you trust someone like that your company data? And I'd never want to work for a company so stupid to ask for that. It's a clear sign of control-freak, unfocused management.
Re:However.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is outright illegal in my country. Don't you Americans have any basic right to privacy?
Welll..... what we fought so hard for, and so many of us have died for, was the idea of freedom. That includes privacy and anonymity. It was not more than a hundred years ago or so that people had real privacy and became pretty upset when somebody violated it. Was considered very rude and improper.
I would say that we have a deep tradition of privacy, that it's a basic human right, and that our Constitution supports it.
However, our current government has clearly said, "fuck all that liberty shit". Whatever information we can get, in any way we can get it, we are going to do in the name of either profit or national security. Pick an excuse.
Feeding the troll :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternatively, it's a sign of having relatives who use Facebook to communicate, just as having a Myspace account is a sign of having nephews who had a heavy metal garage band. And besides, Facebook was the next place to go after Orkut had become a wasteland :-)