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"At the end of March, we learned members of the United States Congress were looking into drafting a bill that would bar employers from asking potential hires for private login information for their Facebook accounts. States had been instituting laws on their own, but after more and more stories came out about people feeling pressured to hand over their private information by someone in the position of giving them a job, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said enough was enough \u2014 this is something that needs to be dealt with on a national level. And now, the Social Networking Online Protection Act has made it to the House of Representatives while the Senate continues to work on its own version. Important question: Do we get to call it SNOPA? I\u2019m going to call it SNOPA. \nSNOPA was introduced on Friday by Reps. Eliot Engel (NY) and Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) and would ban employers from requiring someone to hand over their username or password to a social networking account. In case you\u2019re keeping track of party lines, Engel and Schakowsky are Democrats, but Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is a Republican and was also working on a draft. So, this could very well have a lot of bipartisan support. We can all agree on this: human resources should not have the right to demand to poke around in our private business.\nEngel issued the following statement:\n\u201CWe must draw the line somewhere and define what is private. No one would feel comfortable going to a public place and giving out their username and passwords to total strangers. They should not be required to do so at work, at school, or while trying to obtain work or an education. This is a matter of personal privacy and makes sense in our digital world.\u201D\nThe bill would not prohibit employers from conducting an Internet search to see what has been made public by a potential employee, but if there is something that a user of a social network doesn\u2019t want someone to see, it\u2019s up to them to make things private. SNOPA, however, would make asking someone for access to a private account illegal, and a company making such a request could be fined a $10,000 civil penalty. Something not addressed by SNOPA is email addresses, unless that somehow falls under the purview of social networking. So far, the wording seems to apply to only social networking sites, under which Facebook would certainly be covered. Facebook\u2019s own policies prohibit the forced sharing of information, and has already threatened to sue companies that would demand it. (No such suits have been filed yet, to our knowledge.)\nAnd if employers believe that their particular line of work requires such an invasive practice, they should think again: colleges, universities, and schools are also subject to the restriction."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/employer-facebook-passwords-legislation/>