Want a job in Bozeman? Password please.
Want A Job? Hand Over Your E-Mail Login
(CBS) If you’re planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Montana, be prepared to hand over much more than your references and résumé.
The Rocky Mountain city instructs all job applicants to divulge their usernames and passwords for “any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”
“Before we offer people employment in a public trust position we have a responsibility to do a thorough background check,” Chuck Winn, Bozeman’s assistant city manager, told CBSNews.com in an interview on Thursday. “This is just a component of a thorough background check.”
“Shame on us if there was information out there available about a person who applied for a job who was a child molester or had some sort of information out there on the Internet that kind of showed those propensities and we didn’t look for it, we didn’t ask, and we hired that person,” Winn said. “In many ways we would have let the public down.” </em>
Well of course! On the off chance that a child molester might actually want to be a Bozeman garbage man or say, an assistant city manager (jobs being roughly the same, one being garbage out, the other garbage in), by all means invade their privacy and ignore their right to freedom of speech. After all…its for the children.
Madness.
