OMB: Owner-Managed Business

Bozeman, MT Goes Phishing--Applicants Seeking City Jobs Must Disclose Usernames and Passwords : Los Angeles Business Litigation Blog

It's no secret that more and more employers are doing a quick Google search for a job applicant?s name as part of their background checks, but the City of Bozeman is taking it one step further.

In an article published yesterday afternoon, Montana's News Station reports that applying for a city job now requires turning over some fairly sensitive information. Specifically, the background check form for city jobs requires applicants to

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.,...There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

So let me get this straight: in the pursuit of honest employees (see the link for more on that), the city wants applicants to break the agreements that govern their participation in sites like Yahoo, Google, MySpace, and Facebook? In most sites, the legalese contains something to the effect that your account is not yours, but the site's, including the username, and may be used by you only as long as you conform to their current terms of service. The terms usually include something along the lines of "keep your password secret", "do not share your password with anyone", and "change your password anytime you suspect someone else may know it". It seems mighty fishy to me that the city wants to hire people who cannot be trusted to keep their word.

In fact, it seems "phishy", too. Think about all those bad guys sending spam to try and trick you into revealing your usernames and passwords. Now all they have to do is get hired in the HR department of city hall and they can have their pick of account information. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if Bozeman, Montana, gets buried in resumes sent in by Eastern European hacker-type bad guys wanting the mother lode of phishing information. Sites like Monster are already overfilled with spammy multilevel scams

And finally (and most importantly), this is an egregious privacy violation. For even applying at work, one could be subjected to an unprecedented level of monitoring and spying, could have unscrupulous city employees using login information to masquerade as the applicant in various online communities and forums, and could have one's private (not work-related) e-mails and instant messages violated by a potential employer.

The update that says they've stopped doing this gives little comfort. It shows a profound lack of sense, decency, and commitment to the well-being of the city's workforce. It shows that no one thought about the dangers inherent in data-collection, and especially the collection of sensitive personally identifying information (PII). It was wrong from the beginning, yet no one in the city hierarchy stopped it from happening. Now that there has been a furor, they have shelved it for the time being.

If the people running the city cannot understand why the policy was wrong, if not illegal, they should be removed from office. First of all, for someone to propose such privacy-invading measures requires a complete lack of respect for the privacy of employees and prospective employees. It shows a willingness to trod into gray areas, too, which is quite a risky strategy when you report to the local voters. Secondly, for this to be approved shows a complete lack of integrity within the managers and politicians who reviewed this. Finally, for the policy to be implemented shows a complete lack of managerial controls, the kind of controls that prevent idiotic policies like this from chasing away prospective employees and generating lawsuits from current employees.

Know this: no small, locally-owned business (SLOB) could get away with something like this. Even if the owner-manager is integrity-challenged, he knows that this would hurt his business. Once the economy bounces back (from what I expect will be a double-dip recession) and the supply of labor tightens a little, anyone with options will speedily flee from such an employer, leaving only the least desirable employees.