By snoadmin
Keeping your personal and professional lives separate is important these days. What someone does outside the workplace or classroom should not be an issue unless it is directly affecting his or her performance.
However, the rise of social media has caused more employers to keep tabs on both prospective and current employees. Even public and private universities are looking for insight on prospective students by searching their Facebook profiles.
This trend of employers and universities tracking social media accounts has spawned the California legislature to take action.
On May 2, 2012, the California Assembly Committee of Labor and Employment unanimously passed Assembly Bill 1844. The bill prohibits employers from requesting personal social media user names and passwords from employees.
The Social Media Privacy Act was also approved a week before by the California Senate Labor and Industrial Relations Committee. It prohibits colleges from asking for prospective student social media user names and passwords as well.
In both situations, this is a step in the right direction toward maintaining some shred of privacy in a world where almost anyone can display their entire life online.
People enjoy sharing their lives with friends and family through social media. Using social media is a great way to stay connected. Personal social media profiles should not have an effect in the workplace or classroom. Whether what someone posts on Facebook is politically correct or not, social media profiles should be considered an extension of our private lives. Employers and universities should not visit these profiles expecting to get a better grasp of the person.
It is understandable why employers and universities would want to check prospective employee and student Facebook profiles. There is a lot of information on social media sites that give insight on prospective employees and students.
That information can help bosses and college administrators decide whether someone is the right fit for a company or school.
The problem is that many people are different from the persona they portray online. Employers and universities can get a wrong impression of the person they are tracking and this could determine whether a qualified student or employee is admitted or hired.
These new laws should not dissuade individuals from keeping their Facebook privacy settings tight, though.
Just because employers and universities cannot ask for social media user names and passwords, they can still Google applicants’ names.
The most important thing to remember is that social media profiles are a representation of an individual. Whether or not someone can legally follow someone’s Facebook profile does not mean they should not worry about their image.
With the new Facebook timeline making it easier than ever to rummage through people’s pasts, do not post photos and statuses that can come back to haunt you later. What you post will stay there forever.
These new laws do relieve some of the stress of wondering whether employers or universities can keep tabs on prospective employees and students.
However, just because they are not asking for the information does not mean they cannot find it. The Social Media Privacy Act does not change the importance of making our social media profiles accurate extensions of our lives.
