Employers Get In Trouble Too With How They Use Facebook, MySpace, Etc.
Those worried that their Facebook or other social networking data can come back to haunt them in the employment context can take heart: employers can get in trouble as well if their use of such data is unauthorized and runs afoul of employment discrimination or privacy laws. Examples cited by George Lenard in an interview with ZDNet are:
- If you you've granted your boss "friend" status, then you've likely given up any legal basis for “reasonable expectation of privacy” claims.
- If you use a work computer to post information to Facebook and your boss gains access by using the Windows feature that remembers your password then you've likely given up your expectation of privacy but the actions by your boss are probably illegal under federal computer fraud and abuse act. Even if they are illegal, however, the reality is that you will likely lose your job and not know about the snooping so won't be able to pursue a claim against the employer.
- If you make your boss a "friend" in Facebook, you've likely lost any chance of claiming a privacy interest in the information you post to your Facebook account regardless of how they use that information. So if you're arriving to work late each day and post that information to your Facebook account, you can't later claim that your boss violated your privacy interests because you were disciplined or even terminated because of the tardiness that they learned of through your Facebook postings. However, just because you've granted access to that information to your boss, you have not granted it to everyone in the world. So if you grant it to your non-work friend and your friend passes that information to your boss, you may still have a privacy interest in that information against your boss.
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