A friend alerted me to this story out of Bozeman, Montana: Town Requires Job Seekers to Reveal Social Media Passwords.

As part of the background check process the town officials require their job applicants to list any websites, email and social media sites they are members of, including MySpace and Facebook and give their passwords. Their reasoning appears to be that because they have people applying for jobs with police, fire and various other things that it’s important to see the integrity of these people and that would be a way to do it.

Although to give out passwords is a violation of personal safety and in some cases site policy (as in the case of Facebook).

When I see this article though it reminds me of the case a few years ago where a police officer in Lexington, Kentucky was fired over the content of his MySpace page. There have been other similar cases involving other police officers, school teachers and public officials.

I’m also reminded of the fact that my husband, who is a police officer, made it a point to not create a MySpace page, or a Facebook profile. His online presence is very minimal. Any of his social activity occurs in the non-virtual plane, because he considers his job and social status more important than having an online profile. He often tells me that the internet should just be for looking up movie times and reading news, and if he ever wants to play a game he just uses his XBox or the Wii.

When he first explained this to me I was confused. I’m very active online, while I no longer really update MySpace I do have Facebook. I have livejournal. I have dreamwidth. I’m on MyBlogLog and yahoo. I have IM and skype (though I don’t use it very much). Though I do not give out a lot of personal information online and I keep hubbie very anonymous, at his request, I am still pretty “out there”. It’s another example of how opposite we are. Except that I’m careful what I put up on the sites. It’s not anything and everything. It’s just things that are either fluff or updates for relatives on how the munchkin is doing or things that are going on with our household.

I could understand a job wanting to know how many of these sites a person participated in because it might be an indicator of how much time they would spend at the job trying to use the internet for personal things which should be kept outside the workspace, but asking for passwords is a clear violation of privacy, and I hope that the legal recourse sides against the town in this.