March 28, 2012 08:52 PM UTC

Perlmutter Draws The Line At Your Facebook Password

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• by: Colorado Pols

Worth noting, from Rep. Ed Perlmutter’s press release yesterday:

More and more employers want to access your Facebook and social media accounts with your password for job screening purposes.  Not so fast, says Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO-07) who introduced a provision that would prevent employers from requiring current and prospective employees to hand over their personal passwords as a condition of either keeping or getting a new job.

Perlmutter said, “People have an expectation of privacy when using social media like Facebook and Twitter.  They have an expectation that their right to free speech and religion will be respected when they use social media outlets.  No American should have to provide their confidential personal passwords as a condition of employment. Both users of social media and those who correspond share the expectation of privacy in their personal communications.  Employers essentially can act as imposters and assume the identity of an employee and continually access, monitor and even manipulate an employee’s personal social activities and opinions.  That’s simply a step too far. ”

Unfortunately, House Republicans voted 236-185 against the amendment, which was included as part of the FCC Reform Act (HR 3309).  If passed, the amendment would not change the overall impact or intent of the FCC Reform Act.

This reminds us of the recently killed Colorado Senate Bill 3, Sen. Morgan Carroll’s “Employment Opportunity Act,” which would have restricted the use of consumer credit information in making hiring decisions in most circumstances. If anything, employers requesting your private social media account password is a much clearer-cut invasion of privacy–tantamount in every way we can think of to an employer asking to open personal mail.

And look at the other similarity–party-line votes to kill! We’d say that provokes a logical question for Rep. Perlmutter’s GOP opponent Joe Coors, Jr. Does Coors think you should give up your Facebook password, as a precondition to working for his former company if he’d wanted it?

We have to think there are some CoorsTek employees who hope not.