Rumors about Bozeman’s evil policy still bouncing around the Web

A lit­tle reminder about the long tail of Web gos­sip this morn­ing: An arti­cle in the Pasadena Star News yes­ter­day still refers to Bozeman’s for­mer pol­icy of ask­ing job appli­cants for their Web passwords.

If you’re plan­ning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Mont., pre­pare to clean up your pro­files before you sign that appli­ca­tion. As part of Bozeman’s background-checking pro­to­col, the city requires appli­cants to turn over the user names and pass­words for all of their social net­work­ing sites. Those not will­ing to com­ply need not apply. Could this be a har­bin­ger of things to come for other munic­i­pal­i­ties and pri­vate corporations?

Mind you, the pol­icy was elim­i­nated on June 20, more than a month ago.

The fact that word of this pol­icy is still spread­ing around the Internet is a tes­ta­ment to the stay­ing power of ideas online — and to the real­ity that many of those ideas can be out of line with the truth. Still, I sup­pose this is an indi­ca­tion that, for some peo­ple at least, Bozeman has become a sym­bol of new media pol­icy gone awry. If peo­ple can learn from that, I guess it’s a good thing — not good for the city’s rep­u­ta­tion, but good in general.

I should note one more thing about the Pasadena arti­cle. I don’t know whether this was writ­ten by a real reporter at the paper or whether the paper is even a “news­pa­per,” with reporters, edi­tors, etc. At the bot­tom of the arti­cle, the reporter is iden­ti­fied as the founder of a debt-free liv­ing Web site. Maybe she’s a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to the paper; maybe this arti­cle was bor­rowed from an online repos­i­tory of free con­tent. I don’t know.

Can any­one famil­iar with the paper clarify?

Related posts:

1. Montana ACLU con­grat­u­lates Bozeman for rescind­ing pass­word policy
2. Bozeman back­tracks on pri­vacy matters
3. A let­ter to the Bozeman city attorney
4. Late after­noon Bozeman fiasco update
5. Not quite done with Bozeman yet