Employers who ask job seekers for Facebook passwords

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are apparently going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking for credentials to be able to login and poke around for themselves.

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks. 

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publicly available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks. Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview.