So I am looking for an internship for this summer and I've submitted a couple of applications. For some internships, they asked for a tweet or a link to the applicant's facebook page to presumably determine the applicant's social klout I would guess. So while I knew that some employers wanted to know how active a person was with social media, I was shocked to read an article which said that employers were asking for Facebook passwords from applicants during job interviews. This Associated Press reported that some companies and goverment agencies are asking for apllicants' passwords in order to log in and look around as the user. Apparantly troubled by this report, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut in an another Associated Press article said they were calling on the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to start investigations.
Now I suppose that, no I cannot come up with any reason why companies would ask for an applicant's password. Social media is an increasingly important part of most companies' efforts to increase their brand image among other things but I think asking for a password to verify an applicant's  social media credentials is going a bit too far. What do you think?

When the new ipad e-book publishing software came out,  we talked a bit in class about the issue of pricing the e-books. There was mention of the matter of how pricing of the e-book once published would be determined among other things. That was what I remembered when I saw the  New York Times article which mentioned an investigation by the Justice Department of "pricing collusion between Apple and electronic book publishers. "People with knowledge of the inquiry" state that antitrust officials have pressured  five major publishers with the threat of a lawsuit based on charges of working together to raise the price of e-books to reach a settlement. What came to mind again was our discussion of seeing two big publishing firms espousing the new e-book software by Apple who were however not mentioned in the article.
The current model of pricing allows publishers to set their own prices for e-books. The disagreement is on a pricing policy considered to be important to the survival of the publishing industry to be critical to its survival as e-books have a large share of the market.
I dont know how this investigation will turn out but it doesnt surprise me that some publishing firms want to increase the price of e-books in a concession. With the increase in the sale of tablets,  e-books might concurrently increase even more and publishers want to make the most of that opportunity. We can only wait and see how the investigation turns out and if it makes any difference in the pricing policy adopted by the publishing industry.