Should Job Applicants Provide Facebook Passwords? No. Unless It's the HR Manager Post They're After..

"Please enter your facebook log-in details." If that were one of the requests on a job application form, what would you do? When I first noticed streams of comments this week on the topic of employers asking (or demanding) to be able to view candidates' facebook pages I have to admit to thinking that this was just a limited bit of nonsense in some backward part of a distant state across the Pond.

It is real, though, and, whilst I am not sure how many actual instances have arisen or whether it might be restricted to applicants for professions where it might (I say 'might' - that doesn't mean I agree it should) be reasonable to make a thorough check of someone's personal publications, it is a worrying development.

If it is something that Human Resource Managers have decided to start including in the process of selecting from what must be an ever increasing pile of candidates for jobs in these days of high unemployment levels then I would like to add my voice to the objections being raised.

My first thought is 'Why just facebook?' This makes me think that there was a group of very intense and well-meaning sorts sat around a table one day who made the decision in a virtual vacuum, with little or no informed advice. One can imagine the discussion:

"Did you hear about that man who posted rude pictures on his ex-wife's facebook page?"
"Oh, terrible. Seems to be more of an unsocial network to me..."
"Yes, lots of youngsters putting silly images of themselves on there. No shame. What is the world coming to..."
"When I was young..."
"Exactly. It sounds a horrid place and not somewhere I'd want to let my children go."
"I suppose our employees do use it. Who knows what they're saying about working here..."
"Or us..."
"Hmmm. We ought to do something to check."
"We do. I regularly Google the names of some - you know, the ones we'd be worried about."
"So you know what they're doing there then?"
"No, there's some private setting or something they use to hide stuff from us. We would have to have their log-in thing."
"How about asking all our new applicants for that? That would give us some background as to what mischief they get up to and also probably cut down the number that get through to interview as well."
"Good idea. I'll get that added to the form. If they don't like it then that's a good indication that we wouldn't want to trust them anyway. Probably the sort that will come in half awake after being on that internet all night."

What I do find odd, though, is why this is all about facebook. There are rather more places than just the one everyone talks about out there and, of course, Google+ which has so far survived remarkably longer than I had anticipated in being readily accessible at work and in the Colleges I know about. Whilst one might expect a better class of people using the latter, if the HR Committee is going to want to look for the dirt then they really do have to realise that the social networking world is not called facebook. It seems that uninformed managers are beginning to use the term rather like they might use Biro or Hoover.

Then there are blogs which they don't seem to have thought much about at all. That's where I would write the stuff that I am most likely to be thrown out for, where HR would see what I thought about something, or what I got up to In The Village and that would be far more informative than some snaps on facebook.

It strikes me as quite wrong. In the rare instances of someone being suspected of publishing comments that damage their employer's reputation, provide information that should not be made public for commercial or other reasons or in cases of bullying then one would expect investigations to be facilitated to ascertain the accuracy of accusations with specific permissions being granted but some general rule that says someone can roam freely through areas that an individual has chosen, probably on good advice, to restrict to certain friends, is wrong, very wrong.

I can imagine the band of social do-gooders raging against my comments and saying things like "If they have to hide what they say or do then they shouldn't say or do it." My view would be to say to the individuals concerned that they should continue to decide what they wish to be in the public domain and, if they're asked to reveal more, look elsewhere. Unless they're applying for an HR Manager post - in which case they should tidy up their act temporarily first, supply all the passwords with a nice smile, get the job and then fire whoever instigated this in the first place!

The section below is from ZDNetUK's article by David Meyer:

Asking job applicants for passwords is not in itself unlawful in the UK, according to Ed Goodwyn, partner in the employment team at law firm Pinsent Mason.
This disturbing practice represents a grave intrusion into personal privacy.
– US senators Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer
There is also unlikely to be a breach of the Data Protection Act if the applicant hands over login details willingly, he noted. However, Goodwyn agreed there are some risks for prospective hirers.
"If the employer relies on a protected characteristic which is apparent from the Facebook pages (such as that the candidate is a trade union activist, is disabled, etc.) then that will be unlawful," Goldwyn said. "Furthermore, once the employment relationship is formed, any further use of Facebook in this way without further permission from the employee would be a breach of the implied duty of trust and confidence."
Companies could also face legal problems if they treat a worker less favourably for refusing the request, he noted.

Why am I here?

No, I know about the Mum & Dad thing, it's not that sort of 'why am I here?' I was just wondering out loud why I spend so much time on Google+ nowadays and used to spend similar vast numbers of hours on twitter, blogs and, rather longer ago now, Facebook.

Twitter I understand. Tweeting is like shouting at the television, except more people hear what I say. It's easy, just type a few words as I'm watching something and get a kick out of making someone laugh. It's also been a useful place to get great links to things that are going on in the worlds that interest me and, with careful choice of who to follow, provided a newsreel that was almost essential reading each morning and still is something I'll scroll through once or twice a week, especially for local news and where the people haven't started on Google+.

Facebook was once a place where I thought I would build a sort of virtual world of Me, with huge volumes of photo albums, blogs routed to its Notes pages and Facebook pages for this and that, events I could invite people to or write about and generally keep up-to-date with what friends were saying. I use the term 'friends' loosely - and Facebook friends almost deserves its own entry in the dictionary. The 150 or so who were in my list comprised a strange collection of family, socially-inclined relatives, ex-students needing help and geeky nice people I met at conferences. And a bundle of others I didn't really know very well or occasionally worked with but added as friends anyway. Now its only use is as the place to post an urgent message for one of my children and I genuinely can't remember when I last specifically visited the site or changed my status as Google+ and Twitter updates do that automatically. The funny thing is that most of my 'Facebook friends' probably still think I'm really active there.

Blogs are great for articles and I do love writing and publishing my thoughts and views. So instead of writing piles of notes and uploading them to VLEs or digging out Dreamweaver to edit my web sites I can simply type, add and publish. Job done. I don't think I've changed how or why I use blogs much at all over the last ten years. Apart from Blogger's recent misbehaviour with page links and the advent of Posterous making publishing almost anything delightfully simple being naughty and nice respectively, if I want to write more than 140 characters and also refer to it again in future then a blog has been the answer.

And then along comes Google+. I jumped in at the very start and now have the dubious honour of being ranked by CircleCount in the top 600 men in the UK. Quite what that actually means I'm not sure but, bearing in mind that there are fewer MPs than that, it can't stay long at that level and I'll surely be plunging before long to the ranks of those who ramble on about this and that and have an average number of followers. But I didn't join to get some rank anyway. Why do I write stuff there? I hardly know any of my followers. Or, for that matter, those I follow. I get a brief description of what they do for most and think they may be of interest in one or more areas of the world I inhabit and they go into one or other Circles. Occasionally someone will have a query so I feel that I can be of help and publish advice or even an answer. Equally, there are some damn fine minds there who can provide answers and inspiration.  But that's not the only reason I'm there. The news is good. Like the Twitter newsreel I mentioned above, the Google+ stream is something I'll scroll through several times a day. But even that's not what it was as I now have so many people in the stream from all walks of life and background that it's neither one thing nor the other. One moment I am reading about some fascinating new ideas about teaching and the next there's a video of Andorra's entry in Eurovision. Or a cat doing something cute.

So why am I here (or there, as this is mainly about the time I spend on Google+)?

Getting IT right and getting IT wrong

Interesting e-learning forum meeting at Broxbourne today. Wandering around the brand new college it was great to see plenty of spaces that students, or anyone else for that matter, could use with pcs and wireless access available across the building for those with the log-in details. They claim to have 'the fastest network speeds of any educational establishment in Europe' which wasn't something I could test although web pages certainly did snap at you, loading as fast as you could enter an address. In a funny way, I quite missed the small delay!

What I did particularly like, though, were the myriad facebook pages evident and the fact that the equipment was scattered and not limited to strict rows in a workshop. There were even comfy seats, sofas and I could well imagine students happily staying on there after the last timetabled session as opposed to rushing to get away as most tend to do in most places I'm aware of. Well done, all involved in planning there.

Sure, the small matter of £zillions being available so that one could start from scratch will have helped but I am certain these kind of areas could be created at other institutions, and the less restrictive attitude to where students go in their own time wouldn't cost anything except a few slices of humble pie to be eaten by those who keep maintaining that they have to block all blogs and social networking to, er, protect students. They do have filters in place for the nasty stuff but generally tutors are trusted to control where they visit in classrooms and the use of proxy browsers appears to be as close to nil as it'll ever get.

That cheered me which I did rather need as a lunchtime discussion was worrying. Another member of the forum was explaining how yet another compliance word now being spelled with a capital letter, safeguarding, had affected her day-to-day life at another college. Apparently she could not have students as 'friends' on social networking sites, she couldn't send e-mails from a private account, nor text from her own phone. Basically, she was told she mustn't communicate in any way with a student other than via an 'official' route and that included offering lifts as well, incidentally, and not for reasons that had anything to do with insurance. I presumed that it was OK to talk to them about something not directly associated with college but not so sure she wouldn't have had restrictions on that too!

The person in question was not some dodgy old bloke with a history of complaints from 16 year olds. It was a bright and cheery young lady dealing with students not a great deal younger than herself. Whatever the age or gender, though, this sort of misinterpretation of initially well-intended guidlines is dreadful. Clearly her institutional managers have decided to bolt down the hatches and have attempted to regulate themselves out of any possible issue but just what does that say about their trust in the decency of their staff? It says they have none, or worse: they presume that their staff will behave despicably unless controlled somehow.

It is so difficult to argue against this sort of thing. You get all sorts of looks and tut-tutting but someone has to. I am beginning to wonder if I might need safeguarding myself - against misguided policy-makers and the aspersions they'll be casting before long.

In two minds

I'm in a bit of a quandary about Facebook and Twitter. Up until now I've been using Facebook mostly for social stuff and Twitter for slightly more serious work-related thoughts. Occasionally they've overlapped or I've used Twitter to say something that just occurred to me but generally Twitter seems more suited to the quick comment than Facebook.

Lots of people, though, do use Facebook status messages very much like Twitter and I get streams of odd thoughts, outbursts, comments and rants changing the home page every few minutes. The people I like to communicate with are also spaced out across the two so Facebook friends miss my tweets and vice versa.

Perhaps I'm not so much mad (previous article!) but schizophrenic now, displaying one character in one place and another in the other! So I've decided to join the two which means my poor Facebook friends will now see their home pages scrolling down even more quickly as my tweets get added and what was once a weekly status change could turn into several times a day or more as the mood takes me. There's always the Remove button so I shall not feel too bad.

I divided the two initially when I noticed that a colleague tended to send tweets every few minutes from various conferences she attended. She had the two accounts linked so I was getting everything twice and some days the whole of my Facebook home page was occupied with copies of tweets I'd already seen and wasn't really wanting to see again. I didn't really want to annoy or bore non-work Facebook friends with my tweets so stopped Facebook collecting them. I don't seem to have got into that tweet-a-minute gossip mode, though, so, hopefully the increased status changes won't now be too much of a nuisance to Facebook friends.

Something else I noticed about my behaviour was that I tended to think before changing my Facebook status - not so much about what I was writing but who would be likely to read it. Tweets didn't matter - they seemed more transient (although I am aware that Google can now locate and publish them!) - and the likelihood of actually seeing any of my followers other than a couple of people was almost non-existent. I quite liked that laissez-faire approach (and also got the message out much more quickly) so my Facebook friends will be seeing more of that now.

Until I decide that I prefer schizophrenia again.