UPDATED City of Bozeman asks for online passwords for job applicant background checks

A story from local CBS affiliate KBZK is generating a little ire this morning. It seems a concerned and anonymous e-mailer pointed out to the news station that the City of Bozeman, on its criminal background search consent form, asks applicants to list their personal and business Web sites, Web pages and any memberships to online social groups or chat rooms. This includes providing the city with usernames and passwords, presumably so city employees can log in and check to make sure you're morally acceptable.

The story aired at 10 p.m. It may have aired at 5:30 p.m. too, but I wasn't watching the new then. The point it, it's spreading a bit on Twitter this morning and it was linked on Boing Boing last night.

UPDATE: Slashdot, Read/Write Web, and several other sites have picked up on the story too. There's some lively commentary on all sites concerned, to say the least.

I went back to the KBZK site and watched the "uncut" version of the interview a reporter did with city attorney Greg Sullivan. I transcribed most of what Sullivan had to say. It's pasted below.

Sullivan: "The city does that for several reasons. The primary reason is hat all the positions that the city hires and all the employees that we have, we view their work for the city as a public trust to uphold the public's trust in what we do every day.

"So we have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity to have those positions, all the way down to lifeguards and the folks that work at city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure that the people that we have have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the city."

At this point, Sullivan points out that there are city employees who were hired before the city began asking for social networking information on its criminal background check waiver. From what he understands, he said, the city began asking for that information three or four years ago, "as soon as those social networking sites became popular."

The reporter reads the state constitution's right to privacy clause and asks Sullivan to respond.

"The right of privacy applies to every single person in their daily lives in regard to state action in Montana. It's one of the most important rights that we as individuals have. The city takes upholding those privacy rights incredibly seriously.

"So what we're looking at here is a balance to that right to privacy with the needs that the city has to ensure that the employees that are brought on and that work for the city have the high level of integrity and will protect that public trust.

"What we're doing is, essentially, we're balancing the individual's right of privacy with the need for the city to ensure that we have the best employees we can. In ensuring the privacy, we do that by the, background checks are one tool that we use, along with reference checks, the application itself, and some other things.

"That tool that we use [social network checks] only occurs when a provisional job offer is made. So we don't do those investigations on the social networking sites at the beginning of the process, but only once we've gone through the entire interview process. We get to a point where they're one of the final candidates, and we make a provisional job offer. Then we do that background check.

"The other important thing here is that prior to doing that actual investigation, we make sure that that person knows that we're about to do that. And then they knowingly will consent to us doing search."

The reporter notes that the anonymous e-mail that brought this to the station's attention was no so much concerned about giving the city the addresses of social networking profiles. Instead, that person was more concerned about giving the city the usernames and passwords. Sullivan responds:

"In order for us to get access to the chosen candidate's information, we need to be able to view their page. And so that's the way we've chosen to go about doing it. As far as we know, there's no other way to get into their specific Facebook page.

"One thing that's important, too, is that once we ask for that password and we do the review, that password is protected. We don't share that password with anybody. We keep it in a secure personnel file. And it never goes anywhere beyond that. So it's kept private. We ensure that in this balancing of the public trust with our employees and the person's privacy interest, we make sure that every step of the way we're cognizant of protecting the privacy.

"One thing that's important for people to understand about what we look for is that none of the things that the federal constitution or the state constitution lists as protected things, we don't use those, we won't gather information based on the person's race, their age, their marital status, things like that. We don't use those in our hiring decisions. What we're looking for are very specific things that go toward that person's character and their ability to uphold the public trust. It's important for the public to understand, we're looking for very specific information, not putting out this broad brush stroke of trying to find out all sorts of information about this person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process."

Sullivan said that he had not heard of any employee getting that far into the application and interview process and then rejecting the provisional job offer because the city asked for his or her passwords.

He also said the city uses its investigations into a person's social networking sites as "a source of character judgement" and he went on to look at only one example, police officer candidates:

"If a candidate is showing things in their past that were evidence of criminal behavior that would raise flags with us about whether that police officer would be a good candidate to protect the City of Bozeman."

"We've designed this program to make sure that we protect people's privacy, that they have knowledge that we're doing these types of searches, and that we balance that with this public trust."

On a semi-legal note here, I'd like to point out that MySpace and Facebook, just to name two, expressly forbid you from revealing your password to any third party in their terms of service. By turning over this information, you're violating those sites' TOS, and your account could be suspended.

Related posts:

1. A letter to the Bozeman city attorney
2. E-mails to the city of Bozeman
3. Late afternoon Bozeman fiasco update
4. Bozeman backtracks on privacy matters
5. A look at a few tips Bozeman gives its job applicants