Two lawmakers are taking a stand against companies that have been demanding access to employee’s social media accounts.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.) will introduce a bill preventing companies from snooping on your Facebook page, Twitter profile or other sites. He told Politico that the practice is an “unreasonable invasion of privacy” for people seeking work.
“Senator Blumenthal is deeply troubled by reports of employers asking job applicants and current employees to surrender the login information for their social media accounts,” says Nu Wexler, Blumenthal’s communications director. “He believes the practice is an unreasonable invasion of privacy and he is working on legislation that would ban it.”
Blumenthal’s bill is expected to be introduced to the U.S. Senate in “the very near future.”
A California state senator, however, doesn’t think that’s quick enough. Democrat LeLand Yee announced Friday that he’ll soon introduce a similar bill in California’s senate.
“It’s completely unacceptable for an employer to invade someone’s personal social media accounts,” said Yee in a statement. “Not only is it entirely unnecessary, it is an invasion of privacy and unrelated to one’s work performance or abilities.”
According to a spokesperson for Yee, his office discovered the problem while working on a separate initiative to digitize public records to make them more seachable by the general public. In the process of interacting with the technology community, Yee found out about the phenomena of employers demanding private information from prospective hires.
“We put that issue on the backburner and decided to address it next year,” says Yee’s spokesperson. “Then the Associated Press started to report on these cases nationwide, and the senator said ‘We can’t afford to wait, this is happening too quickly.’”
Yee’s spokesperson says that Yee is glad the issue is being addressed at the national level, but he thinks his office can move faster than Washington and pass a bill in California by Jan. 1. He’s taken to Twitter to ask people to share stories of employers demanding access to their person accounts.
Been a victim of employer request/demand 4 #socialmedia info in #CA? Let me know so we can pass #privacy law bit.ly/GS0viB #Tech #SM
Facebook itself took a stance against the practice Friday morning.
Do you applaud the lawmakers’ efforts to ban employers from asking employees for their social media login information? Sound off in the comments below.
Source: Mashable
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