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.