COLUMBUS, Ohio -
The topic of online privacy is something we hear about all the time -- especially when it comes to Facebook.
If you have a Facebook profile, you know there are all kind of different settings and choices you can make to customize your personal level of privacy; but are those tools working how you want them to?
HOW TO: Download & Explore Your Facebook Archive
BLOG: Employers Rights Vs. Your Right To Privacy
What does your on-line profile say about you? What would your employer – or prospective
employer – learn if they went online and looked at your Facebook page?
A Xenia, Ohio Burger King
employee lost his job when he celebrated his 25th birthday by getting
naked and taking a bath inside a sink used to clean the restaurant's kitchen
utensils. He compounded his poor judgment by posting a video of his bubble-bath
on his MySpace page.
Surely you have more sense than that. You would delete unsavory
pictures and illicit posts before you went on a job interview, or if you
learned your employer would be looking at your social media pages. But here in Ohio you can't delete your way
out of your messy social media life. It
is legal in Ohio for employers, employment agencies and labor unions to ask you
to surrender your personal password, and as we learned in a recent experiment,
your password can open your entire history to inspection and judgment.
I went on Facebook and found a volunteer who was willing to give
us her password. Using that password,
local attorney Sara Jodka went to work.
In the interest of full disclosure, Sara and I are colleagues at Porter
Wright. You should also know that Sara advises her clients who are
employers against asking for personal passwords during the hiring
process. What she uncovered demonstrates
the exposure you face if you surrender your password.
Using the volunteer's
password, Sara was able to access every item the volunteer posted on her
Facebook wall since the day she signed on – in December 2007. She was able to see every picture and every
video the volunteer posted, every ad she ever viewed, a list of all her current
and deleted friends. What I found most
surprising, however, is that even the private messages to single individuals
that the volunteer had typed into a pop-up message box were available for
viewing. We printed out more than 200
pages of conversations the volunteer believed to be private – even those she
thought were deleted. If an employer has
your password all of this information will be at their fingertips.
Ohio Senator Charleta
Tavares calls it an invasion of privacy.
She has re-introduced a bill that stalled in the legislature last year
that would make it illegal for an employer, an employment agency or a labor
union to ask you to surrender your personal passwords. It is vital to note that the Tavares bill
would not ban employers from looking at your social media pages, it would
merely deny them access to the password that opens to examination your hidden
files, deleted items and history.
Tavares says employers have a legitimate right to examine the pages that
you have open to the rest of your on-line connections. It's especially relevant, for example, to
exclude people with sexually explicit and inappropriate language from working
with children.
Sara Jodka points out that
the passwords are also relevant in certain legal disputes. For example, a worker claiming debilitating
injuries that made it impossible for him to lift heavy objects was found to
have posted pictures of himself weight-lifting.
Our volunteer was shocked
at how much private information we were able to uncover – especially her
private conversations dating back to 2007.
It's all readily available thanks to a new Facebook access program that
lets you download your entire history.
Anyone can do it if they simply have a Facebook account and know the
password. If you are curious about your
own on-line history and what it might reveal to an employer, the director of NBC4i.com,
Denise Yost, has prepared instructions that will let you download information
about your Facebook account. You can access the instructions here. Additionally, I authored a post for a legal
blog examining where your right to privacy ends and the employers' right to
screen applicants begins. You can find
it here.
Our volunteer vows to never have another private
conversation on Facebook. Are you
re-examining your on-line habits?
Experts have always said you should not post anything on social media
that you don't want your grandmother to see.
You might want to also think about how your online posts would be viewed
by your employer. And, don't get me
started on what all this might mean in divorce court.
