If you want a job with the city of Bozeman, MT it’s only going to cost you all of your privacy.

We’ve written before about how employers are checking out social networking profiles of potential employees, and how even college admissions offices are even doing it, but the city of Bozeman, MT has taken it even further, and it is quite frankly pretty scary.  Earlier this week, Steven Hodson at The Inquisitr brought this startling story to my attention that the City of Bozeman is requiring all job applicants to not only list what social networks they belong to, but they also must turn over their usernames and passwords.

The job application states:

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.

In theory this is mainly done due to Facebook not allowing you to see the profile of anyone you have not friended, but that feature is optional on all other social networks.

As Mr. Hodson points out, this is tantamount to handing over the keys of your house to your employer, and telling them to have a look around.  Not only would you be giving them access to your profile, but also to your private messages, the ability to see your friends profiles that are otherwise private and other potentially sensitive information in your account.  Never mind the fact that one of the first rules of passwords is to never give them out to any one.

City attorney Greg Sullivan explained the reasoning of this request to MontanasNewsStation.com this way:

So, we have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City.

While it is understandable that a city would want to hire only upstanding people, demanding access to their private information is a whole different matter.  Mr. Sullivan also continued:

You know, I can understand that concern. One thing that’s important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don’t use those. We’re not putting out this broad brush stroke of trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we’re not able to use or shouldn’t use in the hiring process.

The problem I have with this is what if someone entrusted with the checking of your profiles is unethical?  What if they are a gossip?  You are giving some faceless person all of the information they need to find out pretty much anything they want to know about you, and that is worrisome.  And what happens to those pieces of paper you write down your information on?  Can the city guarantee that those documents will be under lock and key at all times with records kept at all times of whom accessed them?

It is easy to understand that in these difficult economic times that people will do whatever they can for a job, but for the city to even suggest that you should hand over this type of sensitive information is insanity.  And, lets be honest here, do they really suspect that if someone is doing something illegal that this will give them the magic solution to finding out?  Do they really think that if someone is a child molester it is going to be spelled out for them on their social networking profiles?

No matter how you slice it this is a bad idea, and something that the City of Bozeman has no right asking for.  What is private is private, and you sure would never catch me giving them access.

UPDATE: Shortly after we published this story it was announced that the City of Bozeman has stopped the practice as of midday on Friday.

The extent of our request for a candidate’s password, user name, or other internet information appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community. We appreciate the concern many citizens have expressed regarding this practice and apologize for the negative impact this issue is having on the City of Bozeman.

Thanks to heatherkoyuk on Twitter for bringing this to our attention.