Employers’ request for Facebook passwords becomes political football

Bloomberg News

Sun coverage More Sun political news

Job seekers expect the tried and true interview questions from a potential employer. Why do you want the job? Where do you see yourself in five years? And the dreaded: What’s your greatest weakness?

But employers increasingly are asking workers and potential hires an uncomfortable and unexpected question: What’s your Facebook password?

The trend has prompted a public backlash, a petition for a federal investigation and at least one lawsuit. On Capitol Hill, the issue’s being used as a political football.

In recent weeks, several federal lawmakers joined legions of Facebook users in expressing outrage over the findings of an Associated Press investigation that showed how private employers in a variety of fields were demanding passwords to social networking sites as a condition of employment.

The lawmakers who have taken issue with the practice are all Democrats.

House Democrats made a move last week to force a vote on a measure that would have maintained the Federal Communications Commission’s ability “to adopt a rule or to amend an existing rule” to prohibit employers “from mandating that job applicants or employees disclose confidential passwords to social networking websites.”

They packaged the measure as a “motion to recommit” — a procedural move designed to kill the politically divisive FCC bill that Republicans were pushing through the House.

That presentation made it extremely unlikely that any Republicans would vote for it, even if they supported prohibiting employers from asking or intimidating workers into handing over their passwords — and sure enough, only one Republican did.

On the campaign trail, Democrats have already pounced on some Republican lawmakers over the vote. In Arizona, Rep. Jeff Flake’s Democratic challenger, Dr. Richard Carmona, set up a website demanding that Flake publicize his passwords after Flake voted against the Democrats’ motion.

In the Senate, things are following a more straightforward path — but it’s still Democrats running the show.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Charles Schumer of New York have called on the Justice Department to conduct an official investigation to determine whether employers can be barred from obtaining employees’ social networking passwords under the Stored Communications Act or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, both of which prevent accessing such information without authorization.

Since there’s a good chance the Justice Department could interpret an employee handing over his or her password as “authorization,” Blumenthal is also working on a bill to make the practice expressly illegal.

Sen. Harry Reid hasn’t said whether he’ll put his weight behind the effort in the Senate. In fact, there’s little indication from anyone in the Nevada delegation as to where they stand on the issue.

Only the House has voted on the matter in a somewhat-politicized context, in which Republican Reps. Mark Amodei and Joe Heck voted with their party — though a Heck spokesman later said Heck still "believes employees should not be forced to provide their personal social networking account names and passwords to employers ... as a condition of employment."

Democratic representative Rep. Shelley Berkley wasn’t present for the vote. (She says she would have voted with her party if she had been able to vote.)

“The right to privacy is a closely guarded Western value. ... Employers have no business prying into the private lives of their employees simply because they are in a position of authority,” Berkley said in a statement. “This inappropriate incursion is out of bounds and violates the basic freedom that Nevadans have long cherished.”

No one in the Nevada delegation has said whether they think Congress should continue looking for legislative solutions.

Privacy activists have been calling for federal attention to this issue for a while, since the very nature of social media blurs traditional distinctions between private and public life. The rise of the Internet as a medium not just for communication but also for information storage, combined with the proliferation of smartphones, means what happens on the street, in a bar or even a bedroom is just a one-click upload from personal accounts where a password is usually all that separates private matters from the public commons.

Social media users are sensitive about that thin line.

There was a strongly negative response to the 2010 Supreme Court decision that found employees had no right to privacy of accounts on work computers, even though all nine justices concurred in the decision.

Facebook, which is warning employers against asking for workers’ passwords, knows about that kind of wrath firsthand. In 2010, the company decided to walk back changes made to liberalize its privacy settings the previous year due to backlash from users.

But even with these measures, there doesn’t appear to be the same urgency in Congress.

As far as privacy matters go, lawmakers are more focused on cybersecurity and the threats posed by hacking than the potentially coercive practices of employers seeking to screen risk in a job-hungry population.