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hi everyone I am Rafe Needleman in San Francisco welcome to a reporters roundtable this week we're talking about a disturbing turn of events in online privacy could you be forced to give up Facebook access as a condition of getting a new job if you're applying for a job at the Maryland Department of Corrections you may be asked to let an interview or into your Facebook account to poke around and see what the social network looks like from your private perspective previously interviewees were even asked to give up their passwords at some colleges in the US students have been required to friend coaches or compliance officers so their lives could be monitored in the social network while employees and students can always protest these requests if you want the job or the scholarship and you're asked for access to your private social network you're likely to feel coerced to give in these reported issues and there are probably others raise important questions around privacy and the delineation between our personal and our professional or public lives on Wednesday a bill to prevent employers from asking for passwords failed to win a vote in the House of Representatives Facebook though has clearly said that it is against the Terms of Service to share your password with others and if the company will fight this trend in all the ways that it can all right so our guest today to discuss this really important issue is Bob Sullivan a reporter at MSNBC who reported first on the story and is the author of the online column the red tape chronicles Bob thanks so much for making the time so how did this happen how did this whole thing come to light tell us the genesis of the story well you know like almost all privacy stories it starts small and it just creeps for a long time now we've known that employers very liberally use Google to background employees they look at social networks they see what people have up there in their public sites and so if you think about it it's really not a large leap for a company that wants to know everything I can about an employee that they're going to invest a lot of money and to say well we see what you got in your public Facebook site but do you got anything interesting behind your privacy wall behind your password and so there's been a couple of scattered incident it's not widespread yet but certainly very clear incidents of either on applications companies asking for individuals to give up their username and password or as you mentioned during job interview saying please log into your account so I can shoulder surf while you click around for your friends and and schools are requiring this kind of thing either requiring that athletes connect with compliance officers or they're using software to manually look at and inspect all of their athletes posts so it's just becoming what what always happens when there's data available employers and governments are gonna want to try to look at it and use it to their advantage so tell us about that in the case of Robert Collins which i think is the watershed incident here yeah a couple of years ago this started and he applied for a job he was a actually a former employee was reapplying to to work back at the Maryland Department of Corrections and they demanded that he give up his username and password and it turned out that this was policy in Maryland at the time they had asked for several thousand potential employees to give up their Facebook username and password he did it because he wanted the job but then he went to the ACLU which complained about it and filed a lawsuit and as a result of that initially Maryland suspended that practice and then when the heat was turned off they slowly went back to something that was almost the same but not quite now they just asked people to log into their accounts so they can see what's on their Facebook account No the Maryland Department of Correction folks say they're doing this because they want to see if a potential guard a potential of prison guard might have gang ties but as you might imagine and you know lots of folks have problems with this and while it's optional well over 90 percent of the people who interviewed did give up their information so it's not optional when you're applying for a job you just say yes when you need a job yeah no kidding especially in this economy now this is also affecting as you said college applicants or sports scholarship recipients is that right yeah there's two different stories there one is I have actually has a lawyer named Bradley Shearer who's really been spearheading all of this he's based in Washington DC he's just a First Amendment lawyer and he's been tracking this for a long time and he has heard from parents who say when their kid went for their college interview the interviewer said can I see your Facebook page can I see inside your Facebook page so nothing systematic on that front but what is systematic is that athletes in big-name sports programs football players basketball players by being required all over the country to at a bare minimum to friend a compliance officer so that means that someone at the school some official a coach or or a an assistant can actually see everything that an athlete posts to their friends even if it's private and they're also hiring these software companies that monitor 24/7 every tweet every Facebook page and again even the ones that are only intended for a limited audience and then sends alerts to coaches whether or not you know if the word alcohol is used for example and opposed so again this makes a lot of people uncomfortable because the real world parallel is how would you feel about a coach having the right to walk into a student athletes off-campus apartment and say okay who's your friends now that happened to to some extent that happened was it a year or two ago at a Pennsylvania School District work school supplied laptops had their webcams turned on by stealth yeah the light didn't come on and is that it was that a similar case and that was mounted monitoring students basically in their bedrooms it was and interestingly with that case I think the the public outcry was unanimous that that was a horrible thing to do this is a little bit more subtle although I certainly think a case can be made it's it's incredibly similar that if you can you know turn on a webcam in someone's apartment what's the diff between that and knowing what people are saying privately to their friends just because it happens to be using a technology device and I keep coming back to this point I write about privacy a lot and I think we we just don't have the right social rules in place for any of these circumstances it's understandable that universities are scared because there's been lots of incidents that an athlete might tweet something really dumb and embarrass themselves and in fact there's a case recently in North Carolina where an athlete was tweeting about all these expensive dinners that he had and he ended up it was clear was violating the professional amateur line and and he ended up you know having to leave school as a result of that in the schools being investigated so there's reasons that schools are interested in this but as a less lawyer Bradley sure says what schools are supposed to do is to teach kids how to do the right thing not violate the First Amendment yeah that sounds like the ends justifying the means argument and which I mean I try not to get too political on the show and reveal my own biases but this sounds to say it's our well Ian I think is just so blindingly obvious to think that what we do in our private lives is no longer basically it's basically not private there is no private life and which brings up the question in the modern world of work and education what expectation should we have and should employers respect for our own privacy in the world of networking well we really need to talk about this and I think we are a decade behind having this public conversation you mentioned that the law was proposed in the House of Representatives failed this week and I don't know who would be against forbidding employers to get potential employees usernames and passwords that's obviously that's not something that's a terrible idea but I think that one of the reasons that it failed is because what would it really have accomplished the line is not really clear you can say you can't ask for username and password but what could they ask for could they ask could they require you to friend someone that's maybe now quite as dramatic and Orwellian a level but it's close there's already recently there was a study that showed that if you had analysts look at people's public Facebook pages forget the private thing using public posts that could actually create something that they loosely called a Facebook score and predict whether or not a potential employee would be a good employee or not and they ran a study and they use posts to identify things like stick-to-itiveness and Fijian Congeniality and all of that and actually turned out to be a pretty good predictor of what their employees would be good workers and so is that is that that's again if you're gonna invest a lot of money as a company you're gonna use every tool that you can but that sure bugs the heck out of me that a company would use a tool that extensive and that invasive but all the things are these things are on a continuum and we don't know whether the right spot on the continuum is yet well let's go back to that the law for a little bit here because I can my perspective on this which I'd like to hear your feedback on is I can kind of understand why a law about requiring Facebook passwords about not allowing people to require Facebook passwords etc could be struck down because one could argue that employment law already protects against the gathering of certain types of protected information religion the medical status age there are many things that you cannot ask in a job interview and if you are made get access to somebody's personal social network that information will present itself to you by nature just go to the profile page yes oh so isn't this information already protected and that's the argument that some of the Senators are and reps we're already making isn't it yeah you hear that argument a lot we don't need a new law do the old laws which need to enforce them and that could very well be true I do think in the digital age again these issues are squishy and when we find one that it's just you know universally accepted there's no reason not to actually explicitly ban it because of course when there's Running Room lawyers will find that Running Room and again you know I can't stress the point enough that government agencies and companies will use all the data that they can get their hands on to make the best assistance that they can that's that's what organizations do and so if it's not explicitly illegal they'll do it and by the way a lot of this activity we're talking about is illegal in places like Europe and Germany you've an employer can't even look at a citizen's public Facebook page to make a hiring decision so there are ways there are societies that are trending to do this in in ways that protect people's privacy more than the US we tend to be pretty hands-off with these privacy issues and hope the marketplace works the mountain I think it's hopeless to think that free market is going to determine what's private and what's not in a way that's beneficial to consumers so the house Act to prevent the collection of passwords didn't pass this time through what is the future you think of legislation in in this space well there's been forever talk of an updated privacy law an omnibus bill and and it is time for that although I understand every technologist is listening to this right now a friend is at the thought of members of Congress sitting down and making you know hard decisions about this very complex area they need to get a lot of good advice when they do it but what we don't have is is very clear rules that that empower consumers to know what people know about them and what they can do about it and and I think it would be a really good place to create it's a civil right in the European Union for example the right to privacy and here in the u.s. our rights are very vague and almost always take a backseat to a tool to technology expansion to innovation and even in issues of computer security that privacy of people comes last and it's something we really need to talk more about well with with that perspective certainly you must have some thoughts on what a citizen can do when he or she is applying for a job or a scholarship or grant or some kind of aid or something like that knowing that their information may be collected from their public or semi-public profiles on a social network from insurance records from well from any anywhere I mean what is your advice for the the the person the human being in the United States caught up in the middle of this this confusion well well a very specific advice right now for a group of people there's really two kinds of people when it comes to privacy there is people who say they care about privacy and then there's people who say they don't care about privacy and you know I have nothing to hide but the folks who say they care about privacy and that's about two-thirds of the us perfectly none of them do anything about it so they might say they care about privacy but they'll still hand over their phone number to a grocery store to get one of those discount cards and they'll still use easy Pat's they don't do it they don't change their behavior at all and and that's a little bit naive I did a story with the professor Daniel solo who wrote a great book called the digital person as a professor at GW University and the headline for the story was life isn't fair and companies aren't either and one of the things that he finds with young people right now college students just after college students is there's this sense and even though you and I talked about it we know we shouldn't have pictures of people doing keg stands on our Facebook page the truth is a lot of young people believe you know what I get when I apply for a job the human resources person that's a person - they've done all this it's not gonna be that big a deal and well well that makes him crazy during this conversation that really is the mindset of a lot of younger people that that ultimately they're gonna be treated fairly out there and I'm here to promise them that they're not went especially in this economy once somebody has 50 people applying for a job if you're the one with the moderately embarrassing pictures on your Facebook page you're gonna be the first to go and this is a harsh reality like life isn't fair companies aren't either and I think the basics are where we should really start I I do I get excited when people are appropriately paranoid about what might be construed about them in the future and I can conjure up lots of scenarios about how someone might map your music tastes your future employment prospects and and all those things I think are going to happen but today what I want people to do is to be incredibly conservative but what they put online what pictures they put online what tweets they post we see it every day we saw it with Spike Lee this week people accidentally tweet things to get them in a whole host of trouble in the future so it's so easy to do and if you're young and you don't have a solid job yet maybe it's time for you to drop off the grid for a while it's really important to realize that you're not going to be treated fairly when somebody sees something out of context in the future if I may make a leap of a comparison you know this has been some people have talked about what you do online is the digital tattoo and you know walking around in any city or in any place sometimes you see people with crazy tattoos on their neck and you know that's never going away at least not inexpensively but from my perspective that's those are the people who make life interesting people are willing to take that risk willing to be a little bit crazy in their youth everybody grows up one way or the other what you're proposing I have to say sounds like a conservative milquetoast socially conservative milquetoast boring world where everybody is so concerned about looking good that they repress who they really are and we end up with a horrible boring world and a huge thriving undercurrent of society that is totally off the grid and unknown and I'm very sorry to do that but I think it's the best advice I could give someone right now and I I would of course never want to enforce a boring world on people but a boring virtual world I think that's right I think that right now we just don't know what things are going to look like in 2020 and we we don't know I hinted that this already but I know these kinds of projects are already underway if somebody can map the kind of music you download to your likelihood that you'll show up late for work in the future they're going to do it and employment background companies are going to sell that it's going to be very valuable to future employers so you know frankly the footprints that you leave online you just don't know how they're how they're gonna cost you in the future and so you're best off not having them or having as few as you can what what musical taste should we put into our Facebook profiles to insure ourselves a better job history in the future well see you that that's actually a that's a good point credit scores and credit reports are a really good lesson for what we're talking about right now the credit score formula is one of the great mysteries of life in America we all have hints as to what it is but it's a secret sauce like fried chicken no one really knows what it is and it has to be secret because if it weren't secret then people would game it and all of these things that I'm talking about with privacy what kinds of things might make you a future good employee we're not gonna know what they are so you won't know if saying that you like the Beatles is good or bad for you and only able to tell you that and the minute that you know it will no longer be relevant because the companies will stop selling it that's the merry-go-round that we're caught in here hey what does Facebook say on this whole topic they can't be silent on this no when I first approached them they really didn't know how to respond we spent about a week going back and forth and then they gave me a statement and frankly they wouldn't give me an official statement they just pointed me toward their Terms of Service which quite clearly imply that you're not allowed either to give your username and password to someone or that you're not allowed to let someone else watch while you surf your account I think they didn't realize how extensive it was and then there was a three or four weeks of stories and so recently they published a blog post which was quite clear where they said no giving out your Facebook passwords and in fact we stand ready now to to do everything we can even legal action to stop employers from doing this it's a real threat to Facebook's business model if they get a sense that these people are abusing the service in this way and for the employers out there I'd like to also touch on the fact of what can happen to you as an employer as a hiring person yeah if you end up with access to somebody's private data Bobby you want to talk about the exposure that this opens up to employers oh I can't stress enough what can of worms are opening up if you're an employer just for starters first of all just acquiring people's usernames and passwords we all know that they're probably using those usernames and passwords at other places and immediately you're probably subject to the Federal Trade Commission safeguard rule so you now have private data you have to take care of it and if you don't you're liable for what happens to it so you're an employer and you can now have a cabinet employment file full of people's passwords inevitably someone's gonna steal it and you're gonna be in a lot of trouble in your mind to pay for it so there's a lot of money additionally especially when it comes to colleges what you find out once you start rooting around people's private information you start rooting around their Facebook page you know the example that I was told again and again with yeardley love and the terrible murder incident down in Virginia what if the school's athletic compliance officer had access to some tweets a Facebook post it might have hinted that and then felt like that was going to occur and didn't stop it wouldn't may incur incredible additional liability for not stop not intervening it and that the more that you have access to the more liability that you have and as an employer I wouldn't want to touch that with a ten-foot pole tell me about these compliance officers what's the job description and how do we get a job like that it sounds it sounds great job for a voyeur or I don't know but you know that a student-athlete their lives are very hard right now and they have a million rules to follow and as a result in order to keep these programs going there are guys men and women the clipboard to run around making sure that they are wearing the right tennis shoes that they're not accidentally getting their picture taken with a car dealer who might use it as an advertisement that this it's actually a being a student athlete can be can be pretty difficult so there are I mean you know we used to hear about morals clauses and in sports and for TV actors and things like movie actors what is the state of the the moral monitoring of public and semi public employees right now in the social sphere you know I just don't think that there is one I really think this this story which again we know this has been going on for at least a couple of years so it's not as if this is a brand new thing it's just come to light now we barely scratched the surface of talking about it and as a railway have no social mores I ultimately hope that's what takes over here I ultimately hope that you know we all reacted to this idea that school would turn a webcam on people's homes it wasn't anyone who thought that was a good idea so I think almost all school districts now would would not do that everyone did it it would be a rogue superintendent I hope that's the kind of thing that happens with this Facebook password Facebook password situation by the way we didn't even mention there was a case in Minnesota of a 12 year old student who allegedly was having a spat with a teacher and was hauled into the principal's office with a sheriff's marshal there who had a sidearm actually and they demanded that she gave up her Facebook password so that they could see what else she was saying about the teacher essentially so so this kind of thing is happening all around the country and again who's a twelve-year-old to say no to the principal and demand like that but but I am hoping that socially we decide now this is this is just a step too far this is like looking in someone's diary which we would never do and and let's just cut it out we need compliance compliance officers that's what we need all right what's coming up for you what's next in in this developing story well I write about privacy all the time and you probably have already gotten a sense of my drumbeat here which is there's there's data that's collected now about us in so many different ways collective what every time we make a phone call every time we use an e-zpass every time we get onto a subway or use public transit and all that data is is is being used in credible ways and meaningful ways in some ways you know great ways for marketers a great ways for us to understand ourselves but consumers are last in the bottom of having access to that data and right to dunk to control that data and it's it's really time that people stood up and said enough is enough that data is valuable it's my property and I should get to decide what what happens to it great Bob thanks very much Bob Sullivan is the writer of the red-tape Chronicles over at MSNBC if you care about this stuff and you should you should check that out Bob thanks for your time thank you