Should Employers be allowed to view employees’ social networking sites? Is it an over intrusion of the employees’ privacy?
I believe that employers should not be allowed to view employees’ social networking sites or even prospective employees’ sites. I believe it is an invasion of a person’s privacy. It has always been stated that someone’s social life should be keep outside of the work place. So this should be maintained even with the new inventions of technologies such as social networks and more.
Someone could have a different perceived identity online than they do in real life, and employers should only judge the identity people have at the work place. For example, people act differently in different situations. Work is usually a more serious atmosphere, while celebrating a birthday is a completely different atmosphere. As long as an employee can maintain seriousness and precision at work there should be no need to try to incorporate other parts of their life into the work area.
There was an example of a teacher that was fired because of one of her pictures on her Facebook page. The parents of some of her students saw a picture of her on her vacation, with an alcoholic drink, keep in mind she is of drinking age, and the parents turned it into the principal. Needless to say the teacher was fired due to this incident. I don’t believe this was right on either the parents or the principal part. The teacher had it on her private Facebook page and she is not doing anything illegal; in my opinion that is not something to be fired over. This is just an example of how employers should stay out of employees’ social networking sites.
This blog post brings up a very important topic. Employers these days are certainly looking up employees and potential employees to see what they are doing while not at work. Although at times this may see like an invasion of privacy, employees are constantly representing the place where they work. And if they continually are making bad decisions, even while not a t work, people could see it and not want to be involved with that organization or company. In other words i think that employers have the right to look at employees facebooks in order to preserve the reputation of the company.
ReplyDeleteI don't feel like this is an issue of online privacy so much as just people being stupid. I 100% believe that employers have the right to do background checks on employees through sites such as Facebook. In this case the parents and principal were simply acting like children. The woman was fired for performing an act she was legally allowed to do! It seems that so many people these days have lost their common sense and act on impulse rather than logic. I personally would LOVE if the people who contributed to this woman getting fired, were also fired for some outlandish reason.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the other to comments. I believe that employers have every right to look at employees and potential employees profile pages. If I were an employer, I would want to know what my employees were doing in their off time so that the reputation of the company remained intact. I don't believe that employers have the right to fire an employee for doing something legal. The employee would have to be doing something illegally to warrant dismissal from the company.
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