Password Denied.

Now that I am in the midst of applying for full-time work, I can say one thing: my favorite part of the interview process is when I give my interviewer the key to my house and tell him that he is on his own for a few hours to search as he pleases. After all, what better way to analyze a person’s character than by searching through her drawers, perusing through the items in her filing cabinet, and even reading her diaries from middle school? Forget those pointless reference letters that my three references took hours out of their day to compose – what conclusions about my character could possibly be put together from those, anyway? Dig up some dirt in my house, and please refuse to hire me because I left a dirty sock on the ground in my bedroom; surely, that must show that I am a sloppy and incompetent worker.

Okay, so none of my interviewers have actually asked me to hand over the key to my house (yet…dun dun dun…!), but I am finding myself quite outraged at the issue brought up in this article from Time Magazine. Basically, a teacher’s aide was fired because she refused to hand over her Facebook password to her employer after a parent claimed to have seen a photo on this woman’s Facebook page that was deemed inappropriate. The Superintendent wanted to see the picture for himself, but the teacher refused to give her password to him.

The article left me with a few questions. First of all, if the parent was able to see the photo on the teacher’s Facebook page, unless the parent (or her child) was Facebook friends with the teacher, how is it that the parent can see the picture, but the Superintendent needed the teacher to hand over her Facebook password in order to see the photo? Couldn’t he have created his own account (or signed into his account, if he had one already) and see the same photo that the parent saw, since the privacy of the photo was obviously not set to “Friends Only”? Did the Superintendent just assume that because there was one “inappropriate” photo, there must be more that needs to be investigated?

While undergoing any teacher education program in this day and age, it is probable that you will have a discussion about the use of Facebook on more than one occasion. Should you have a Facebook account if you are a teacher? Should you change your name on your Facebook account so that your students cannot find you? Should you accept friend requests from your students (most schools have policies against this, although some teachers believe that it is okay for students to add them so long as the student is no longer in that teacher’s class; other teachers do not accept friend requests from students until the student has graduated from high school and/or college)? There is no simple answer to any of these questions, and it’s really up to the teacher’s best judgment to deal with these issues, should they arise.

That being said, it is also the teacher’s responsibility to make sure that the information she posts and posted by others about her on Facebook – especially information that can be easily used as blackmail or deemed “inappropriate” – is hidden from the public eye. You don’t want to be like the New York principal whose spring break photos, taken straight from Facebook, were passed around the school or the Georgia teacher who was fired because pictures of her holding bottles of alcohol while on a vacation were made accessible to students via Facebook. If you are a teacher and opt to use Facebook, please make sure that all of your posts and photos of you are set to “Friends Only.”

Another word of advice: keep everything “Friends Only”; don’t make anything visible to “Friends of Friends.” If you do, you run the risk of one of the people on your list of friends perhaps knowing one of your students by coincidence. Maybe the student is a neighbor or a cousin of one of your friends. Maybe you added an old student because she graduated from high school, but she is friends with her own younger brother, who is currently in high school and would love to dig up dirt on you. It only takes one student to spread your information around the school.

As for the issue of handing your password over to another person – what’s the point? You’re not asked to hand over the password to your personal email account to your boss, so why should that be expected of your Facebook page? People can act entirely differently in a professional setting than they do in a personal one, and when a person is an employee at a company, the professional is who is going to show up to work every day.

So employers, yes, you can look to see what a potential employee has made public to those on Facebook, but don’t ask him to hand over his password unless you are willing to give him your password in exchange. I’m willing to bet that the information available on your personal site isn’t 100% professional, either, especially in your private messages. Or how about your personal email account or text messages? Let me read every text message you’ve ever written to your wife because it will tell me everything there is to know about your character.

Seriously, when it comes to a person’s character reference for a professional position, just stick to the reference letters. A lot of thought went into them, and I’d hate for you to dismiss the opinion of a person who has actually met and worked professionally with your potential new employee over a picture on Facebook of your potential employee doing a “gangsta” pose with some friends. (Waddup.)