The city of Bozeman, Montana was taken to the cyberspace woodshed recently over a policy of asking job applicants for their passwords and logins to social neworking sites. News reports about the policy quickly gained the attention of bloggers all over the world.

The city’s background check policy required applicants to provide login details, including passwords, for all social networking sites they belong to. The requirement, which is included on a waiver statement, asks applicants to “Please list any and all current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” Forcing applicants to turn over their passwords, especially for Google and Yahoo, may even cause the applicants’ personal email to be vulnerable to snooping as well. Bozeman’s City Attorney defended the policy in true lawyerly fashion, claiming the policy was necessary to protect the public trust.

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