That was the case for one person who applied for employment with the City. The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city’s background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.
The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person’s “background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records.”
“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.
I suspect they may backtrack on this. This is dangerously close to the government checking you out for thoughtcrime. What’s next, will they be asking for diaries and your papers from college to make sure you didn’t write pro-communism papers? I mean, they already do a criminal background check against you, so why are they trying to find more ways of denying you this job you’ve been able to apply for in the past no matter what you’ve written elsewhere. They don’t ask for a listing of articles you’ve published in magazines or newspapers, do they? Will they want a list of websites you’ve participated in comment discussions on as well, to check for more thoughtcrime that might disqualify you from the job? Oh, yeah, they actually do! Talk about an invasion of privacy. I suspect that either they will relax these rules or have no one willing to work for them.
The informal poll at the top of the linked page is 98% against this, 1% for and 1% don’t care. I think
Tags: bitch bitch bitch, total cockup, tweets, wild speculation