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California passes social media privacy law
Under a new California law, it is illegal for employers or admissions officers to require applicants to hand over their social media usernames and passwords.
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Listen up social media addicts, in California at least, you will no longer have to feel pressure to divulge your Facebook user name and password. Earlier this year, there were reports of college admissions officers asking students for their passwords. That led to outrage and eventually to legislation.
"These social media accounts are really private matters," says California state Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat who authored the new law. "It contains personal information, no one ever thought that this information would be then made contingent for admission into a college and university"
What you put on a social media site shouldn't affect your employment either, says Democratic Assemblywoman Nora Campos. She authored another law that protects private sector workers.
"An employer does not have access to your personal photo album at home and does not have the ability to ask you questions on your marital status, who you're dating…Those are a lot of the things people post," says Campos.
The laws that protect social media privacy were passed with little opposition. They both take effect on January first.
Bravo, cwals, for telling it like it is! During the Christmas season I responded to some comments about buying American and Union/American wherever possible and I put up a link to a company in Tennessee that makes the best jeans I have ever owned in a plant in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Being a Georgian, this is a real point of pride, especially when a large, national catalogue used these jeans to get famous for their jeans and then moved production to China, stealing the design, and raising the price $10 to $84 per pair calling them "Ballroom" jeans. This kind of corporatism hurts American jobs, Americans, and our economy overall. Facebook tried to limit my ability to make public posts for "spamming" in the context of a conversation about American made gift ideas while overt ads litter the page. Did Facebook expect me to pay them to mention a great American company that is beating the odds and growing? Beats me. I'm retired, out of the game, and have no motivation to "spam" about anything!
Only a grassroots movement and a third party are going to save our political system from the two-headed corporate puppet show we have now. When we elect a President that is supposedly 180 degrees out from the past office holder and he continues over 50% of the most onerous policies, doubling down on some, it should be plain to see it's a game between the "two parties".
When surveyed neutrally, Americans favour politics resembling Sweden, Denmark, and Germany - the three most socialist, and most prosperous (in terms of capitalistic corporate profits and standard of living for ALL their people), and most just nations on Earth. Let's leave the 20% on the extremes behind so that the vast majority can have a country that works for everyone, raising up the poor and allowing the rich to be rich - all in dignity.
We are seeing a new threat to democracy when Facebook uses its rules to limit freedom of speech and Facebook members are complaining is droves to the FCC and Justice Department over selective punishment and cancellation of Facebook accounts. It appears that the people being selected out are the ones shouting out against Third Way corporate politics......liberals not wanting the word to get out about Clinton's caucus as the reason for the wealth inequity and corporate unaccountability. It seems they only have to complain about friend requests to have people taken off the Facebook map.
Everyone using Facebook knows that people have 500, 1000, and 5,000 friends are all breaking the 'close friends only rule' yet all of these millions of people thrive by breaking this rule. Only when someone doesn't like the content of a Facebook page complains does Facebook come down hard and often eliminates that page. This selective policing is discriminatory and prejudicial and will be overturned.
The question is this: how is it being allowed to happen in the first place? Why are people in the position time and again of having millions of people complain and millions of dollars lost to corporate malfeasance before changes are made? It is because white collar criminal agencies and regulatory agencies have been eliminated. We have no corporate oversight. Obama was elected with a promise to revere this policy and hold corporations accountable yet as we see he is doing the opposite.
The American people are seeing that the Democratic National Party has been hijacked by Third Way corporate pols and as such the party runs only corporate pols. The people will be running and voting for labor and justice candidates in the next elections
