U.S. states propose legislation to ban employers from asking job applicants for their social networking site passwords

Illinois and Maryland are proposing legislation that would ban employers from asking for the usernames and passwords of prospective employees’ social networking accounts.

The moves come about a year after the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the Maryland Department of Corrections, asking the department to rescind their blanket policy demanding personal social media passwords from corrections officers and applicants as part of the employment certification process.

The department revised its policy, but the ACLU remains opposed to the practice.

“The government should not ask people to ‘volunteer’ access to their private, personal communications,” Maryland ACLU legal director Deborah Jeon said in a 2011 press statement. “Few job applicants, eager to please a prospective employer, are going to feel genuinely free to decline to give up their information.”

A blog on Lawyers.com lists some of the liability issues for employers that ask for social network passwords from their prospective employees. Although laws differ across jurisdictions and the state of the law around social networks is still evolving, “in general, employers are on very shaky ground demanding access to employees’ or applicants’ personal social media accounts,” the site notes.

Specific liability issues include:

• Violating privacy laws or laws that govern surveillance provisions. This might include the violating the privacy rights of social networking “friends” of the employees or job applicants, since the communications of the friends would be subject to the same monitoring as the employee or applicant.

• Wrongful termination suits, in the event that an employee refuses to turn over their social media site passwords or user names.

• Potential lawsuit arising out of a refusal to hire a prospective employee on the basis that he or she did not provide social network account information.