Facebook Password Is Fair Game Summary

In Alfred Edmond Jr’s “Why Asking for a Job Applicant’s Facebook Password Is Fair Game”, Edmond explains his reasoning behind why he thinks that employers should be able to ask for the social media passwords for the applicant’s accounts. Alfred generally makes a strong case that if you post anything to social media that whatever you post is expected to be public and, therefore, should made accessible to the employer, however some of his points fall apart under scrutiny, weakening his argument.

Edmond’s tone was mostly a casual tone, addressing the reading as he would in a sort of business casual setting. It was effective in getting me to sympathize with his points and while still being able to take him seriously. The author mostly used an appeal to emotion, with some appeals to logic. His approach works pretty well, he uses the appeals to emotion to emphasize if you are going to share a post to the world then why not allow your potential employers to see it as well.

Edmond starts off strong by acknowledging that while he would have consenting to giving a company the password to his Facebook profile that he thinks that there are some fields that he believes that asking for the

Facebook password would be acceptable. Edmond states that if he were running a child care business that it would be reasonable for him to ask for the password to his potential employee’s account to see if the employee has a history of inappropriate communications with minors. This example provides the reader with an example of a field that everyone could agree that hiring knowing the applicant’s history would be favorable.
Edmond’s argument does seem to suffer a quite a bit, however, because he talks about giving your Facebook password to your employer but it really seems like what he actually seems to mean is to allow your employer to view your social media profile.

Defining exactly what he meant by giving your Facebook password to your employer would help his argument by defining how much access that the employer would have to the employee’s social media account. Mostly he seems to be making the case that the employer should be able to see the public posts on the employee’s social media, but giving the employer the password would give the employer unlimited access to not only see everything that the employee posts, but also unlimited access to private messages, and access to alter their social media

account.
For a lot of people defining the amount of access that the employer would have to the worker's social media account is what would make or break this argument. Many people would agree to the prospect of allowing a potential employer see their public social media profile would be worth it for the employment, while other people would consider it a deal breaker for employment at the company. Furthermore, I think that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would agree to allow their employers to have full access to their accounts.