It’s a tough job market out there for young people, and putting your best foot forward involves more than it used to.
Now, it includes how you are percieved in social media.
Now, we all know by now that we have to behave ourselves on Facebook, because everyone can see it.
But what if your employer asked for your password, to access your private messages? Is that going too far?
Representative Helen Giddings says it does.
“When people have their own accounts on their own cellphone or or on their own internet accounts,” she told us, “then I don’t think that they ought to be asked for access to those accounts.”
And she’s introduced one of a handful of bills to protect your privacy, even at work.
But Robert Quigley of the University of Texas Journalism School says, it’s a brave new world of social media out there.
“I advise my students that if they are uncomfortable with that idea,” he says, “ there’s two things they can do. One is don’t post anything in private that you would be uncomfortable with people seeing. And secondly, if tht place makes you uncomfortable, then you shouldn’t work there.”
And what you do online can haunt you forever.
“The difference is that they have grown up with facebook,” Quigley says. “This is part of their life, how they communicate. The Legislature is trying to protect people with this private communication.”
But Giddings says, unless you’re passing on company secrets or gossip, it’s frankly none of the boss’s business.
“What will we do next? Ask the employee to turn over their mail?”