Facebook to HR: Back Off Our Passwords
The social networking giant says hiring managers shouldn't ask prospective employees to disclose personal Facebook passwords.
No one can accuse Facebook of not respecting users’ privacy this time.
During the past several months, numerous reports have surfaced about employers asking job seekers to reveal their Facebook passwords as part of the pre-hiring vetting process. On Friday, Facebook formally denounced the practice in a blog post, saying such requests are an inappropriate invasion of privacy and a potentially illegal hiring practice.
“If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan wrote in the post. “We don’t think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”
Egan said requiring prospective employees to open up their Facebook accounts could possibly result in employers engaging in unlawful hiring discrimination based up on a user’s age or other personal information. If a job seeker does allow a hiring manager to access his or her Facebook account, it can also compromise the privacy of the job seeker’s Facebook friends, the post said.
On a separate HR front this week, Facebook ranked third in Glassdoor’s annual list of Top 50 Best Places to Work for 2012. That sounds pretty good until you consider that Facebook was No. 1 in 2011.
Facebook’s overall employee rating slipped from 4.6 last year to 4.3 this year (on a scale of 1 to 5).
Glassdoor is a career community website that lets users anonymously rate companies and CEOs and exposes salary information for specific positions.—John McDermott
Photo via Flickr user pshab.
