Friend Request Rejected: Maryland Bans Employers from Asking Employees for their Social Media Passwords : Privacy Law Blog. Maryland became the first state to pass legislation (House Bill 964 and Senate Bill 433) that prohibits employers from asking employees and job applicants for their social media passwords. The legislation also prohibits an employer from (a) taking, or threatening to take, disciplinary action for an employee’s refusal to disclose his or her password, or (b) failing to hire an applicant due to the applicant’s refusal to disclose his or her password.
While generally protective of employees, there is an exception built into the legislation that allows employers to require an employee to disclose certain access information (e.g., user name and password) for “…accounts or services that provide access to the employer’s internal computer or information systems.”
Microsoft worker who lost his job over Nokia Windows Phone tweets now at Google. ECHR Portal Open View. Insider trading: Red light for Greenlight. Barrister who Tweeted insults struck off. ACTA: The new threat to the net. 692,547 have signed. Help us get to our new target of 3,000,000 Update: 7 July 2012 VICTORY! Our 2.8 million strong campaign helped MEPs axe the ACTA treaty in the European Parliament. This dangerous treaty would have been rubber stamped - threatening our Internet freedom and allowing corporations to police us online. But in partnership with La Quadrature du Net, EDRI and Access, millions of us from across Europe sounded the alarm and the politicians listened.
Read more about the ACTA victory here. Update: 13 April 2012 GREAT NEWS! Update: 10 February 2012 Amazing! Posted: 25 January 2012 Last week, 3 million of us beat back America's attack on our Internet! ACTA - a global treaty - could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Europe is deciding right now whether to ratify ACTA -- and without them, this global attack on Internet freedom will collapse. Big Data mining: Who owns your social network data? The now-trendy concept of Big Data usually implies ever-growing hordes of data, including unstructured info posted on Facebook and Twitter, and ways of gleaning intelligence from all of it to create business opportunities.
The concept, however, also carries with it risks for anyone opening up about themselves on the Internet and raises questions about who exactly owns all this data. Big Data is associated with technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing platform and is prompting some technology companies, including IBM, to make major acquisitions. But the term "Big Data," claims GigaOm analyst Derrick Harris, is a bit of a misnomer; it's really about data from different sources, including social networks and even cell phones. "It's coming from sensors, it's coming from computers, it's coming from the Web," he says. [ Read InfoWorld's primer "The big promise of Big Data.
" | See how IBM views Big Data in Eric Knorr's interview "A conversation with IBM's Mr.