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My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

soft32.com

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Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#2
IANAL, but it sounds like Facebook's own TOS require them to close the account of users who have given away their password, whether to an employer, spouse, friend, or anyone else. Obviously Facebook would be killing its' advertising profits with that course of action, given the number of accounts that would purportedly need to be closed.

Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for access to their car trunk or their home bathroom. Why don't companies try this?

Is your Facebook account your personal property? What about your information after you've placed it on Facebook?

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#3
Time to start denying you have a Facebook account all together, hook it up to a specially made email account for Facebook, don't add a profile picture & don't add friends from work to your network I guess.. Where's the world coming to?!

I might be mistaken - but doesn't this break the United Nations Agreements on Human Rights?

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#5
No, your Facebook account belongs to Facebook. The content you post belongs to you with distribution rights granted to Facebook. Additionally free speech is protected from the government's interference, nothing is in the Constitution about protection from private enterprises.

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#6

No, your Facebook account belongs to Facebook. The content you post belongs to you with distribution rights granted to Facebook. Additionally free speech is protected from the government's interference, nothing is in the Constitution about protection from private enterprises.

Depends. In some regions with data protection/personal data laws (e.g. the EU), there it is clear that some data is "personal data", and hence is, legally, treated differently. You cannot do whatever you want with personal data that people send to you (after you set up a website collecting it). It doesn't matter what distribution rights a company does, they are still bound by the law.

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#7

IANAL, but it sounds like Facebook's own TOS require them to close the account of users who have given away their password, whether to an employer, spouse, friend, or anyone else. Obviously Facebook would be killing its' advertising profits with that course of action, given the number of accounts that would purportedly need to be closed. Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for acc…

Is your Facebook account your personal property? What about your information after you've placed it on Facebook?

Depends. In the European Union, with data protection law, stuff you put on facebook would almost certainly be 'personal information' which cannot be used willy-nilly.

('information' is not usually viewed as 'personal property' in law)

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#8

IANAL, but it sounds like Facebook's own TOS require them to close the account of users who have given away their password, whether to an employer, spouse, friend, or anyone else. Obviously Facebook would be killing its' advertising profits with that course of action, given the number of accounts that would purportedly need to be closed. Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for acc…

  Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems
  like asking for access to their car trunk or their home bathroom*
A peripherally related topic, but how is asking for a drug test unlike asking for access to my home bathroom?

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#9
post #4

> The LAST time I checked, this was still America. As a foreigner, when I read this, I think "so why are you surprised?" Nationalism really irks me.

I don't understand, are you saying he shouldn't be surprised such things happen in the US? If so, I would agree since things like that happen all the time.

What's wrong with nationalism exactly? Since, like most things, there are various degrees of nationalism do you dislike every example of it? If I like the country I live in but disagree with some of its policies, am I still an irksome person in your eyes?

Re: My Facebook Account is Mine, not Yours

#10

IANAL, but it sounds like Facebook's own TOS require them to close the account of users who have given away their password, whether to an employer, spouse, friend, or anyone else. Obviously Facebook would be killing its' advertising profits with that course of action, given the number of accounts that would purportedly need to be closed. Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for acc…

Asking for access to a prospective employee's Facebook seems like asking for access to their car trunk or their home bathroom* A peripherally related topic, but how is asking for a drug test unlike asking for access to my home bathroom?

A drug test is a positive/negative thing where there are well-defined margins and error bars. The employer can say with reasonable certainty that X is a drug user and hence pass judgement on that.

A Facebook login is NOT a positive/negative test - it's more of a "does this person behave well in general" which is a highly subjective measure. What's worse, it's conflating the private and work spheres and letting the employer pass judgement on X's personal life, regardless of how well X can compartmentalize.

The key difference is that drug users usually can't compartmentalize their addiction. Most people can usually compartmentalize their social behaviour. "Usually" is the key word here - there are always extreme counter-examples.

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