Watch What You Say (and Write)
We’ve been asserting for a while that social network access is becoming a significant area of employment law. Take, for example, a recent California case involving a waitress who was fired for making disparaging remarks on her Facebook page about a customer. According to the California Employment Law Report, the court ruled that, under the circumstances of that case, postings to social networking sites are not private.
It seems we’re developing a legal theory that employers can view, and possibly even act upon, information their employees put on the Internet. To paraphrase an earlier California court ruling, no reasonable person can have an expectation of privacy regarding material published on the internet.
But it can go even further. One employer in Montana asked job applicants to provide the login information to their social networking sites, so the employer could view those sites, thereby learning more about the potential employee.
At some point, perhaps state legislators or the courts will specifically define what employees can and cannot expect regarding online privacy. Until that time, however, employers need to extend their policymaking to cover social networks.
Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon. According to Newsweek, there are now over 500 million members. A final suggestion to disgruntled employees, or anyone who may have had a bad day at the office: keep it off your Facebook. There are clearly a lot of people watching.
image, courtesy news.com.au
