This would be illegal anywhere in the EU. you have a right to a private life even at work. Employers cant just randomly go through your email even if its on their servers never mind your home ones (they need to provide a plausible reason to look at 'your'/their company email, ie suspect you of doing something illegal or not in the company interest)

http://www.eucharter.org/home.php?page_id=14

Would definitely be a no, this would give them access to your data and other peoples data which you could end up being liable for i.e. they know someone who messages you something and then go on to reveal that information you would be the one in trouble.

Although alternatively you could always say yes I'll give you access to mine if i can view yours.... you want to know who your potential employing and I want to know who i might be working for and who I can blackmail later. for knocking off his secretary.

At the end of this road is where you have prospective employers paying for a service where they give your email address and are then allowed to browse any network that you've joined, including this one. oops.

Not Facebook, at the time, but now maybe...

AC for very obvious reasons.

I am SC cleared and have been for many years. Many of you will know the level of detail required for that. For those that don't... let's just say it's "fairly thorough". I'm also FSA Enhanced screened. A previous employer also conducted initial and random drug screening too.

For anyone not capable of reading between the lines... I'm squeaky clean (and v boring!).

I was once offered a job at Oracle (here in the UK). The job came with a nice pay rise, which I was quite keen on. Along with the job offer, came a previously undisclosed demand, not only for a full background check (performed by Kroll, which I thought was OTT anyway), but also a _credit check_.

They're paying me _and_ I'm extending them a line of credit for my travel expenses. WTF do they want to do a credit check on me for? It should be the other way around - only I decided that Larry was good for the money. My credit history is NONE of their damn business.

Before anyone jumps in... the job was pretty ordinary and did not entail any kind of access to sensitive or financial data or indeed anything else out of the ordinary.

When I politely declined the job offer and explained why (the credit check, specifically), the response was... "oh, is there some kind of problem then?". Of course there wasn't, but the fact that they immediately jumped to conclusion told me that this wasn't a company I wanted to work for. I didn't say that directly, but they took offence anyway.

They're probably asking for Facebook passwords by now.

This kind of ridiculous carry-on needs to be stopped. Now.

PS - Kroll processes your data outside the EU. They got rather shirty when I asked about the safeguards for my personal data. In short - they weren't able to guarantee that my data was protected to the same standards that it would be under EU laws.

Think thats scary, hows about full medical records!?!

I found it more worrying that my misses got asked for full access to her medical records with a job offer a few months back. She's an accountant FFS and it was one of the conditions of the offer.

She didn't want / need the job so we didn't get to the point of telling them no, but simply the fact that they had the audacity to ask was scary!

How many people ...

so up in arms about this, work for firms who drug test staff* ?

*who have no safety implications

No employer i can think of would have a sufficient benefits package over and above anyone else to make me think about giving up my personal life to that extent. Its not just naming the company and discussing confidential info etc, sometimes you might never mention who you work for, but just use facebook as a way to vent after a particularly frustrating day.

Several years ago, before world+dog had a blog, I used a blog on my own domain as a way to generally just rant about various aspects of my life, work included. A select few friends would read and comment on each post. The company name, nor the name of any employee, nor indeed my own name was mentioned anywhere on the site. On my final day i made the mistake of quickly checking the comments from a different pc and didnt remove it from the history. The boss found the blog that afternoon and about half an hour before i was due to leave he "confronted me" about it in front of the entire staff. Shortly after defending myself by way of telling him a few home truths mentioned on the blog in more detail, i was escorted from the premises. Lucky it was my last day anyway.

I would never be foolish enough to let any employer, or prospective employer see my personal musings ever again. And i would suggest everyone else considers the same.

meh

you know what will be newsworthy? when one day potential employers order people who do not have facebook accounts, like myself, to create one, and then hand it over or whatever. in the meantime, meh. sue the morons, look for another job, do both, whatever.

you know what will be newsworthy?

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse - your post made me shudder and a cold chill when down my spine.

do you want a look in my pants too?

What about the access code they SMS me?

Login Approvals, every sensible person has this turned on for FB (and 2 step verification for GMail), right?

You can have my password, but you can't have my mobile phone!

Which companies?

All I see here is "some companies" and "some other companies".

Names or it's fiction.

Wouldn't work on me

My response to this would be that, as an IT professional, I take security too seriously to be giving out my password. No one, not even my wife, has my Facebook password. I sure as heck am not going to give it to someone I just met just because they're interviewing me for a job. And, were I in the situation of an employer hiring an IT professional, I would have serious second thoughts about hiring anyone who would.

Also, if I were refused a position based on those grounds, I'd be in touch with a lawyer. I don't like the idea of suing because I wasn't hired, but this kind of hiring practice simply can not be tolerated. Only when someone sues will the courts step in and put a stop to it, and I have severe doubts about getting the politicians to do so at all.

Easy.

Have two facebook accounts.

* One with loads of stuff about Nietzsche, 17th century choral music, wallace and grommit, and oxfam.

* And one with pictures of your bum grafted onto cherie blair's neck.

Simples.

make your bed

well, I'm a little surprised to note that so many of the ubertecherati have even considered joining a movement that was set up by a youth on the specious, puerile grounds that he wished to 'vid the groobs' on his fellow (female) students. see 'The Facebook Effect' Kirkpatrick. Good luck for the facefuture.

No Facebook account here (since 2004)

Bite me, prospective employers.

Very presumptuous of you to think that all of us have taken a fancy to Mark Zuckerberg's turd sandwich.

HR Drones

This is yet another example of HR drones trying to justify their existence. I used to have a colleague who claimed that HR stands for "human remains", but I think he was being flattering.

And don't get me started on the fatuous compulsory computer-based training sessions. I've just had to do several of these in quick succession to complete my quota for the quarter. You page your way through sixty screens full of tedious verbiage, where the real challenge is to stay awake, then you complete an assessment that tests nothing but short-term memory and guesswork. Ask me anything related to the training I completed yesterday and you'll find I have retained nothing.

AC because you can't afford to rile HR.

Last laugh

It used to be de rigeur for anyone not interested in sci-fi (roughly most of the literate human race) to laughingly dismiss anything vaguely futurey and dystopian as wank fodder for paranoid propeller heads. It's vaguely pleasing that those who were at the front of the queue to dismiss it as paranoid fantasy are probably now the ones at the front of a very different (and rather less amusing) queue to have their personal peccadilloes and sexual quirks microscopically examined at the whim of someone who probably looks disturbingly like their least favourite schoolteacher.

Nevertheless it would be very wise to put the kybosh on this kind of thing sharpish, or we really will end up in a world even less pleasant than the great writers of the last hundred years could possibly have imagined.

I don't see how I could legally hand over my password

I accept the right of companies to vet staff (especially at the executive as I've witnessed first hand what a minefield that can be) but I see a huge problem for myself in handing over my Facebook password.

In simple terms, all of my Facebook friends have locked down accounts and me handing over my password would be a massive breach of their privacy. Would this not put me substantially in breach of British and European data protection laws and liable for a hefty fine (or even some time at Her Maj's leisure)?

We need a better definition of "Friends"

Friends ought to mean - wll people you know and with whom you are friendly.

Maybe the noun for a person with whom one has the kind of relationship fostered by Farcebook ought to be called something else. "Lamer" perhaps?

Until last year, the city of Bozeman, Mont., had a long-standing policy of asking job applicants for passwords to their email addresses, social-networking websites and other online accounts.

Sorry I didn't like from el reg. But thanks for the link. But that just goes to show the mentality of some folks. So asking for FB password does not surprise me one bit.

Here is some thing else to think about. Lets say your current employer is nuts and demands that you hand over the password to all websites you go to that has forums. Lets say your only site that fits that criteria is a model rail road model RR site. Rather harmless right ? Nut you are an admin on that site. Now your employer can see deleted post or things that was never meant to be seen by the public. What if your employee deiced by all of the deleted post that you must have some whack jobs on that board. Worse yet your employer has access to the email list. Your employer does a search on the email address and finds out that a lot of them visit sites dedicate to people drinking animal blood doing pagan rituals and then having a giant shag party afterwards. I know it might sound far fetched but and ridiculous but then so is employers asking for FB log ins. I been five years ago if you said that employers were going to ask for this stuff I would of called you a paranoid loon.

Say what?

Okay ... So whilst asking for your Facebook credentials is not illegal ... In the UK, you're not allowed to ask any of the following questions:

How old are you?

Are you married?

Are you gay?

What are your childcare arrangements?

Are you planning to start a family soon?

Are you a member of a trade union?

What political party do you support?

All of the above can be derived from your Facebook logins and are covered under the Sex Discrimination Act, the Race Relations Act, the Employment Equality Regulations and the Disability Discrimination Act.

The punishment for asking any of the above in a job interview and then discriminating the potential employee? The prospective employer can be taked to an employment tribunal and face unlimited fines.

An alternative perspective

The old spy adage, which I'm going to mutilate, applies here: The spy of your enemy is only theirs so long as you aren't aware of them, then they are yours.

Employers want to play this game, that's fine, I'm better at it then they are. Whereas many people have facebook accounts for their own private use, mine was built for the sole purpose of my ( or future employers pursuing it ). Everything I post on there is designed to promote the image of a conscientious employee and caring individual that faces the issues that everyone does, but rises to meet any challenge ( you might call that my facebook page's mission statement ).

Sure, that makes me a manipulative bastard...but then that's a compliment in my book.