In “Should employers be allowed to access your Facebook Login?“, The Atlantic discusses an issue occurring in the US where the Maryland Correctional Department demands the login name and password for the Facebook accounts of applicants.
Here’s the answer to the question posed in the headline:
This is reprehensible behaviour on part of an employer. No employer has the right to inspect or expect unfettered access to our personal communications.
We are in a delicate period of privacy – in the past, much of the privacy we have come to expect has been the result of simple practicality: it hasn’t been possible or cost-effective for organisations or governments to probe into our communications – and by extension, our private thoughts.
Now, as electronic communications become more prevalent, we are faced with what may be savage fight as we realise the privacy we have come to expect has perhaps been as a result of practicality, and a changed practicality will result in some organisations and government bodies expecting a radical overhaul of the boundaries.
This is not the time to be afraid of Facebook – but the idiotic, small minded people with too much time on their hands who think that just because they can technically access our private musings, and the musings of those around use, that they have a right to do so. For they do not.
“Thoughts are free, who can discover them?
They fly past like shadows of the night.
No one can know them, no hunter can shoot them down.
When all’s said and done, thoughts are free.”
Never let it be said that the electronic age was when humanity let privacy become a thing of the past.
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