Late afternoon Bozeman fiasco update

As I've already written today, the City of Bozeman, Montana, has been doing some questionable stuff when it comes to background checks on job applicants. The city has asked applicants for the usernames and passwords to their social media accounts for "three or four years," the city attorney told KBZK news on Wednesday.

The news spread from KBZK to Boing Boing and then to other news sites and blogs. And of course thousands of people fanned the fire on Twitter. (I was among them.) Now, KBZK is reporting that the city's receiving an "e-mail a minute" about the matter, including my own. I was even interviewed by the television station for the follow-up story they're working on, and I understand that the newspaper will have a full story tomorrow.

I won't get into the issues in-depth; I'll save that for a post later tonight. I do want to point to that e-mail-a-minute figure as an example of what can happen when social media kicks into high gear. I started posting about this fiasco at about 10:30 last night, and many, many people joined in -- more people from more places around the country than I honestly thought would join in.

As a result, the city is "looking" at their policy, which I think means that we'll see some changes soon, at least some heavy explanation and maybe even some backpedaling. Whatever the outcome, I think we can say that social networks and their users had an effect on the real world today, an effect I hope makes Bozeman a better place to work.

More to come.

Related posts:

1. Last word on Bozeman privacy fiasco
2. Update on request for documents from Bozeman
3. Aggregated media coverage of Bozeman privacy fiasco
4. A letter to the Bozeman city attorney
5. Bozeman backtracks on privacy matters