When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook user name and 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 log-in 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."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/20/BUAG1NNHQ2.DTL#ixzz1pkbKQ6BC 

Welcome to an America where people work longer hours and get treated shittier every year.

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And worse, large numbers of co-workers and "ordinary Americans" will see no problem with the practices at all.

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That would have been a deal breaker for me, so I would have said "give me the CEO, CIO and CFO's same information and you'll get mine".

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As a person with strong Libertarian leanings I must admit that I have always looked to the States as the role model of a country who has strived to maintain its citizens personal freedoms. Articles like this scare me especially coming from the US. A company should not be allowed to do this. A company should recognize why it is wrong to even ask a person to provide this type of information. If a person says something regarding your company via social media or displays themselves in a way that you would not wish to associate to the Public fine. But if their opinions and their attitude is held private within their friends so be it. People provide information in their social media sites that interviewers are not allowed to ask about (religion, political views, sexual orientation, etc) and there is no way that a person should have to reveal this info to a potential employer as in most cases it has very little to do with their ability to work for the company doing the hiring.

This has been going on for a while and there are a number of lawsuits in the works over this issue. I plan to disable my Facebook account before my next round of job and/or grad school searches. I have already removed my profile from search engines. If you search for my name on Google, you will no longer find my Facebook profile, and if it does pop up, clicking on the link will return an "expired link" error. That is a start.

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Ahahahahahahaha...

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You laugh at the quote yet provide no evidence to the contrary as to why any other country strives to maintain personal liberties. Socialism where your country and mine have travelled have defacto removed our personal freedoms as the collective becomes more important than the individual.

Finland has never been a socialist country since we gained independence.

As for preserving rights, the US has steadily been stripping them away from you since 2001, and most of the people in your country seem to be completely oblivious to this.

I'm not saying it's not happening everywhere but still, it's kind of naive to think the ones who hold the power give a crap about the freedom of their people.

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how do i do this