In Illinois, Employers Can’t Ask for Your Facebook Password

…  At least before you get hired.

This issue was addressed some months ago, in the news.  Around the same time I was asked the same question by a reader.

Thanks to a new law signed by Governor Pat Quinn, it appears that an potential employer can no longer ask you for your facebook, or any other social media password in a job interview or as a condition of hire.

From ABC News:

Gov. Pat Quinn signed the law Wednesday at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where several students lamented that online snooping by bosses has caused some to lose out on jobs and forced others to temporarily deactivate their online profiles.

Illinois is only the second state to have such a law on the books, and it leaves no exceptions — even for openings that require thorough background checks.

I believe that this law is a step in the right direction for privacy concerns.  However it does bring up some interesting questions.  Does a person have a reasonable expectation of privacy in what they put on facebook?  If so, what are the limitations?

I ask this primarily because of other areas of law, such as tort, where there exists a strong legal standard for privacy particularly in the home.  Social Media is a different game all together.  Some items you post on facebook can only be seen by “friends” others by “friends of friends”, still others, “everyone”.  So where does the reasonable expectation come in?  Secondarily, is the reasonable expectation of privacy dimished if a person has say “1,000″ friends, as opposed to a dozen?  What about those who open their pages to subscribers?  These questions will likely be answered through the courts, so only time will tell.

The internet is still the wild west in the legal profession.