March 22, 2012
Manuel Valdes and Shannon Mcfarland of the Associated Press report on a growing trend in the hiring of new employees:
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.”
Not surprisingly, privacy groups are criticizing the practice. And the ACLU is getting involved:
Bottom line: we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and technology. The same standards of privacy that we expect offline in the real world should apply online in our digital lives as well.