Bozeman, Montana wants your Facebook password

When Barack Obama started the hiring process in 2008, the media flipped out about how much information his hiring managers wanted to gather from applicants. White House job application leaves no stone unturned, said CNN. Barack Obama wants you (to spill your secrets), said Salon. The seven-page, 63-item questionnaire covered the gambit of personal, professional, and financial background information. It also asked about applicants’ online personas, requesting links to any blogs, Facebook or MySpace pages.

The elaborate questionnaire failed to prevent some embarrassing tax problems coming to light for some of Obama’s appointees, but it may have kept other potential hiring scandals from ever happening.

Montana may have gone for John McCain in 2008, but the little town of Bozeman (population 27,509) is following Obama’s lead when it comes to the job application process.  In fact, the town is taking it a step further. The hiring managers for Bozeman government jobs don’t just want your Facebook profile. They want your password.

Making sure that job applicants don’t have insane or embarrassing social network profiles is totally kosher these days. Checking these things out is part of the due diligence of the hiring process. But Bozeman took it too far. From the Montana News Station (Hattip to True/Slant member Marc Flores for sending this my way):

Montana’s News Station was alerted to the requirement by an anonymous viewer who emailed the station to express concern with part of the City’s background check policy for job applicants, which states that to be considered for a job, applicants must provide login information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.

“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.

via Brouhaha erupts over Bozeman job requirement – Montana’s News Station

This procedure won’t likely withstand the onslaught of criticism it has gotten now that the Montana News Station story has gone viral.

Since Montana’s News Station first aired the story about the city’s policy yesterday, the story has spread like wildfire across the internet, fueled at first by the micro-blogging service known as Twitter. One it was posted there, hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Twitter users began re-publishing the story, nearly all of them harshly critical of the policy.

From there, the story quickly spread to other social media sites, including Slashdot, Boing-Boing, and ReadWriteWeb – some of the largest and most trafficked online communities.

via Social media fuels outrage at Bozeman hiring policy – Montana’s News Station.

The town has been alerted that asking for passwords violates the Terms of Services for just about every social networking site. And 98% of those polled online consider the practice an invasion of privacy.

I’m curious how long this has been a requirement for a job in Bozeman, and how many applicants for the city’s Animal Control Officer [PDF] actually handed over their MySpace account information.

I’m also curious as to whether this whole brouhaha erupted because the government employees at Bozeman are just not that social network savvy. Did they really want to get inside their job applicants’ accounts in order to do research on them, read private messages and even theoretically make changes to profiles?

Somehow I doubt it. I suspect instead that this is more a result of social network ignorance than intended invasiveness.

UPDATE (June 22, 2009): Bozeman has wised up.