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The Facebook-related firings have begun: A teacher’s aide in Michigan was let go from her job after a school administrator demanded that she turn over her Facebook password and she refused. The aide, Kimberly Hester, is preparing for a legal showdown with the school system.
The incident that prompted administrators to ask Hester for her password occurred last spring. According to local news station WSBT, “She jokingly posted a picture of a co-worker’s pants around her ankles and a pair of shoes, with the caption ‘Thinking of you.’” Hester wasn’t using Facebook during school hours or at a school computer, but her brand of humor got her in hot water at work anyway.

When a parent of a student at the school saw the photo, they complained to the district, and school superintendent Robert Colby told Hester to fork over her password. When Hester refused, Colby wrote a letter Hester provided to WSBT which read, in part, “…in the absence of you voluntarily granting Lewis Cass ISD administration access to you[r] Facebook page, we will assume the worst and act accordingly.”

Hester was placed on administrative leave and subsequently suspended. She’s collecting worker’s compensation and is readying her case for an arbitration hearing scheduled next month. “I did nothing wrong,” she tells WSBT. “And I would not, still to this day, let them in my Facebook. And I don’t think it’s OK for an employer to ask you.”

Although Michigan doesn’t have a law prohibiting employers from asking current or prospective workers from demanding a Facebook password, it’s one of several states that is considering such legislation based on recent public outcry about the practice.

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For years we’ve been told to keep drunken Facebook photos and racy wall posts private to avoid the judging eye of a potential employer, but now, according to MSNBC’s Red Tape blog, even that might not be enough.
As Bob Sullivan reports, some employers and colleges are taking the unusual step of either asking applicants to show them the private side of their Facebook profile in an interview or add them as a friend to gain access to friends-only posts. In Maryland, the Department of Corrections has taken to asking interviewees to log in to their account and show the interviewer wall posts, whom they are friends with and photos. That practice, while eyebrow raising, actually makes a bit of sense, because the applicants are being screened for jobs in prisons — but another example MSNBC cites is more curious.

According to Sullivan, student athletes at several colleges nationwide are required to friend a coach or compliance officer on Facebook. MSNBC cites this requirement from the University of North Carolina’s student-athlete handbook as an example typical of many colleges: “Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social-networking sites and postings.” It also says, “The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes post,” leaving the door open for the university to use outside social-media-monitoring companies.

This story comes the same day as a San Francisco Chronicle story on scholarship providers cruising Facebook and other social-media sites to help vet applicants. Now presumably the scholarship providers do not have access to “friends only” posts, so it’s not any different from employers who probe the public activities of applicants online, but the story brings to light yet another way one’s online activities could affect future endeavors. According to the Chronicle, about 75% of scholarship providers surveyed by FastWeb and the National Scholarship Providers Association said they are looking for behavior that could reflect badly on the provider, including underage drinking, racy photos, drug use and racial slurs.

The practice of force-friending and asking job applicants to showcase their profiles has the American Civil Liberties Union and others up in arms over invasion of privacy and free-speech concerns. The Illinois state legislature has even introduced a bill to ban employers from asking applicants for social-media passwords. But if the students want to play sports and the applicants want to get hired, they might have little choice but to submit. While at first this seems like an egregious infringement into private (online) lives, it should serve as a reminder to never post things on Facebook that you wouldn’t want people to see — it’s still the Internet, where nothing is ever truly private. More at http://moneyland.time.com/2012/03/06/background-check-for-the-digital-
age-employers-colleges-ask-for-facebook-passwords/

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