Facebook Feature Made For Employers

This past Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg hosted a gaggle of reporters at Facebook headquarters to announce a range of new features for the popular social networking site. Among the new features is a tool called Download My Information which allows a user to request all of the personal data, pictures, videos, wall posts, friends list and any other data related to the user that is stored on Facebook's servers. Basically, Facebook gives you access to your entire footprint on the site in a single zip file.

Download My Information is part of broader effort by Facebook to allow users more control over their personal information and privacy settings. While these efforts by Facebook may be commendable, the biggest winner in all of this might not be the Facebook users themselves but potential employers. Employers have long been interested in the online activities of prospective employees. By now anyone worth hiring has figured out to take advantage of built in privacy settings to restrict their profiles to friends. To combat this increased use of privacy settings, some employers have gone so far as to require that applicants provide usernames and passwords to any social networking sites the use as part of their application. Thanks to Facebook's Download My Information feature, employers will simply be able to require job applicants to include this complete record of their Facebook activities as part of the application process.

In a world where Download My Information profiles will soon be application requirements as ubiquitous as resumes, writing samples, and references, you have to ask whether employers ability to request such information should be legally restricted. Look at the information contained in a Facebook profile: religion, political views, sexual preference, people you associate with, etc. This is very personal information, and it would be illegal for an employer to ask you about much of this information in an interview. Congress has limited the ability to request other sensitive information. The Americans With Disabilities Act, along with other state and federal laws, restricts an employer's ability to request job applicants provide medical records. Congress and state legislatures should pass similar protections for digital information.

Some people will argue that individuals voluntarily put their information on Facebook with the intention of sharing it with others and have thus exposed it to the world. Even accepting this argument, there's a reason users start an uproar every time Facebook changes its privacy settings. People post information to Facebook accounts with the intention of sharing it only with the people they choose. Some users will make their profiles open to the world, others will set their accounts to the highest privacy settings available. People taking advantage of privacy settings restricting the flow of information shouldn't waive the right restrict access to their account information just because they disclosed it to a select group of friends.