California Bans Social Snooping

[ReinWeisserRitter]

I now wonder how an employer would react when I told them I don't use any social networks whatsoever.

That said, it's pathetic that such monitoring even exists in the first place. It's disgusting the lengths people in authority are going to to spy on other people in case they do something they don't like.

 

[Spartan448]

It's a good move, and certainly shows that the world may be maturing to the technological age, but still....

Fuck NCR.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Thank you, sir, now we need to convince the rest of the world's government to pass a law like this.

This almost makes me want to move to California.

Now if we could get this passed nationally...

Screw that. We need to get this passed into international law.

It's astoundingly dumb that it's not a federal law already, or even plain common sense, to not ask for social networking passwords. Can they still google us to find any misdeeds?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Considering that I don't have any accounts on any social networking sites, this does not affect me in the slightest. That being said, I've always thought that the practice of checking people's facebook and other such things during the hiring processes was asinine, and I'm glad that it's illegal now in California. That's actually one of the things that was preventing me from getting a facebook account in the first place (not that that is going to change any time soon with this law in place anyway).

 

[vxicepickxv]

Thank you, sir, now we need to convince the rest of the world's government to pass a law like this.

This almost makes me want to move to California.

Now if we could get this passed nationally...

Screw that. We need to get this passed into international law.

It's astoundingly dumb that it's not a federal law already, or even plain common sense, to not ask for social networking passwords. Can they still google us to find any misdeeds?

Given that such a minor search won't find me without my middle name, I'd be more worried if they used a site like pipl.com to find info on me.

It's pretty hard to find someone when they share a name with one of the lead engineers at GM.

 

[Spartanmk1]

Leland Yee Standings history:

Tries to get video games to lose 1st amendment protection: -50
Successfully bans employers from finding yet another new way to screw employees: +40.

Tries to ban a safety feature on Semi-automatic rifles -5000


In the end the man is an idiot.

 

[renegade7]

Leland Yee Standings history:

Tries to get video games to lose 1st amendment protection: -50
Successfully bans employers from finding yet another new way to screw employees: +40.

Tries to ban a safety feature on Semi-automatic rifles -5000


In the end the man is an idiot.

I rescind my previous statement.

Yee is still, and always will be, an imbecile.

 

[T_ConX]

The fact that we even need government to legislate against this practice is sad.

Employers are prohibited from asking about your religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and a slew of other things. Odds are, all of these are on your Facebook profile, and when an interviewer asks for your account name and password, they are effectively asking for unrestricted access to all of the above information.

 

[Gilhelmi]

Not to rag on America, but this at-will employment shebang is just fucked up. That's one freedom I can live without.

It is how things have always worked in America.

I am free too quit, they are free too fire me. Legally, my former employer can not tell my future employers why I left/fired (does not mean it does not happen but I could sue if it does).

Is it perfect, No. But, It is better then forcing someone too stay at a crappy job, or worse, forcing an employer to keep an employee that is lazy/rude/dishonest.

 

[Gilhelmi]

Leland Yee Standings history:

Tries to get video games to lose 1st amendment protection: -50
Successfully bans employers from finding yet another new way to screw employees: +40.

Tries to ban a safety feature on Semi-automatic rifles -5000


In the end the man is an idiot.

He did? Can you send me a link?

 

[Realitycrash]

Not to rag on America, but this at-will employment shebang is just fucked up. That's one freedom I can live without.

It is how things have always worked in America.

I am free too quit, they are free too fire me. Legally, my former employer can not tell my future employers why I left/fired (does not mean it does not happen but I could sue if it does).

Is it perfect, No. But, It is better then forcing someone too stay at a crappy job, or worse, forcing an employer to keep an employee that is lazy/rude/dishonest.

Lazy, rude, dishonest is "good cause", at least.

 

[Spartanmk1]

Leland Yee Standings history:

Tries to get video games to lose 1st amendment protection: -50
Successfully bans employers from finding yet another new way to screw employees: +40.

Tries to ban a safety feature on Semi-automatic rifles -5000


In the end the man is an idiot.

He did? Can you send me a link?

It was a serious attempt.

All the information [http://stopsb249.org/]

Thankfully it was killed for the year. It would have banned the Bullet Button which allows quick release of a magazine in a semi-automatic rifle with the aid of a tool. If it would have passed, you would have to disassemble the rifle to reload.

If you get a jam, you have to drop the magazine, rack the charging handle, till the round ejects, then insert the magazine again, rack it and keep shooting.

If you have to break the rifle down, you essentially have to leave a live round in the gun to clear the jam. Some jams for AR-15 style rifles can even prevent you from opening the rifle. One comes to mind where empty brass gets stuck between the bolt carrier and the top of the upper receiver.

 

[Therumancer]

Not to rag on America, but this at-will employment shebang is just fucked up. That's one freedom I can live without.

It's more complicated than many people are making out to be.

"At Will" Employment basically means that either the employer or the employee can terminate the employment at any time, and for any reason. In many cases this IS exploited by companies for things like layoffs, or simply to sack someone before their benefits and hourly pay reach a certain point. From the employer direction the basic intent is to allow them to cut un-needed senior employees for their own survival. While layoffs have turned into a way of "downsizing" to maximize profits, the original problem such laws were intended to address was a company having a bad run for a number of years and being unable to maintain it's current operations, and unable to cut human resources because of contracted workers. As much as it sucks to be one out of a thousand employees let go, in a company of say ten thousand people if that allows it to survive it's far better than the company going under and everyone losing their job. To be honest "At Will" did save a lot of companies for a while, which also protected states and towns by keeping those companies open, more people employed than if they had gone under, and of course bringing in tax money. If you've ever heard about towns basically dying when a factory or whatever was forced to close... that's what it was intended to prevent.

On the flip side it's also noteworthy that "At Will" had a point that a lot of companies didn't like. That is to say that a lot of companies got people they valued hooked on contracts that made it nearly impossible for them to leave in any practical matter for fear of suffering major penelties (like an agreement not to work anywhere else for X number of years if their employment ended for any reason, but covered by a promise that if the company they worked for chose to end things they would get a huge severance package, which meant the company could end the relationship and it would be okay, but the employee couldn;t leave on their own). In a lot of states "At Will" made it so companies couldn't punish people for choosing to leave and work somewhere else, opening the door for a lot of high end workers with very valuable skill sets to change where they worked. It also made it so a company couldn't punish the rank and file (at least not legally) by blacklisting them if they chose to leave without say a two weeks notice.

To be honest I think "At Will" simply needs to be amended, as a principle I can agree with it, but I think there needs to be a transition back to contracted labour, combined with a requirement that to invoke "at will" a company has to prove financial jeopardy. What probably did a lot of good (albiet at a nasty cost) is pure crap now given that "At will" encourages companies to hire people, force (or kick) them out in a year or two, and then replace them, or do things like force people out for intentional labour programs (where they get people from poor countries to come into the country to work for crap wages here, but a decent amount of money where they are from, for a few months, and then ship them back home before more foreign workers are brought in for another "tour", there are companies that specialize in making such arrangements). On some levels I can understand why a company doesn't want to have some guy come in as a Janitor, work there for 20 years and wind up making $30 an hour and nabbing a fat pension when technically any goober can sweep a floor. The thing is that ordinary people who do low end jobs need to get by and make careers out of those things. "At Will" shows that if they can arrange to make sure the Janitor is always new and only making minimum wage, they will do it.

 

[excalipoor]

Is it perfect, No. But, It is better then forcing someone too stay at a crappy job, or worse, forcing an employer to keep an employee that is lazy/rude/dishonest.

That's what the contract is for. I know a guy who knows a bus driver who got fired for refusing to adhere to the proper dresscode. It's stated in their contracts that the employee must represent the company while on the job. He didn't, and that was grounds for termination of employment.

Snip

Thanks for that. 'Twas a good read. Though I've got to add that cheap labor will be exploited, at will or not. Summer workers, unpaid interns, folks sentenced to community service, all great for filling positions that don't require long-term commitment. Some employers just recycle these people to avoid full-time hires wherever they can.

 

[zombiesinc]

I don't know what's more sad - the fact that companies and schools actually asked for this sort of information or that individuals actually gave it to them.

 

[Therumancer]

Leland Yee Standings history:

Tries to get video games to lose 1st amendment protection: -50
Successfully bans employers from finding yet another new way to screw employees: +40.

Tries to ban a safety feature on Semi-automatic rifles -5000


In the end the man is an idiot.

He did? Can you send me a link?

It was a serious attempt.

All the information [http://stopsb249.org/]

Thankfully it was killed for the year. It would have banned the Bullet Button which allows quick release of a magazine in a semi-automatic rifle with the aid of a tool. If it would have passed, you would have to disassemble the rifle to reload.

If you get a jam, you have to drop the magazine, rack the charging handle, till the round ejects, then insert the magazine again, rack it and keep shooting.

If you have to break the rifle down, you essentially have to leave a live round in the gun to clear the jam. Some jams for AR-15 style rifles can even prevent you from opening the rifle. One comes to mind where empty brass gets stuck between the bolt carrier and the top of the upper receiver.

"Idiot" isn't how I'd describe him, more like "dangerously clever". He has a definate agenda and like many Democrats is taking round about ways of achieving them. Knowing that banning firearms outright is an uphill battle at best we've been seeing more of an attempt to try and indirectly handle the matter through controls of specific firearms features, ammunition, and similar things. Obama's plans for a "Bullet Ban" (or so it was dubbed) being paticularly infamous. The basic plan seems to be a long-term strategy of trying to regulate privatly owned firearms down to the point of near uselessness, which will makle a ban, and presumably the enforcement of such ban (as law abiding citizens would be resisting with fairly ineffective weapons) a bit more practical.

Likewise the attack on video games was mostly to get the goverment's finger in the door for content regulation. If the goverment could establish it has the right to rate, and criminally enforce ratings on one thing, that's a springboard for it to go after other things. The left wing for all of it's pretensions of being champions of free speech are the ones who have been out to ban so called "hate speech" and other assorted things, and trying to find ways of asserting an unprecedented grip one way or another for a while.

Even this current act of benevolence is mixed. I agree with it on the surface, but if you think about it, what it's actually doing is limiting the rights of businesses to keep tabs on their employees. Big business being a big opposer of the left wing, and disgruntled employees and organization/action thereof are a big supporter of the left wing. Keeping businesses out of the private affairs of employees hampers their abillity to take action against them organizing or acting politically. This is NOT a bad thing overall, but it's important to understand this distinction. Leeland Yee might oppose business getting into your private affairs and controlling your speech indirectly (by holding people accountable for what they do and say on their own time), but he's not the type that opposes the goverment doing the same kinds of thing by rating and enforcing self-proclaimed content laws on things people do on their own time (like play video games).

Most here on these forums won't agree with me, call me insane, or whatever, but this is how I see it. All politicians have their agenda (on both sides of the fence) and even when they do things you tend to agree with, their motives aren't exactly straightforward. Leland Yee is like the #2 most powerful Democrat in California which is one of the richest states and also the major fortress of the left wing. He's probably one of the top 10 most powerful Democrats in the country (with #1 of course being our current President). He might play on the state level but he's a big deal, and seems to be part of pushing an overall meta-agenda.

The same criticisms can be said about most Republican Leaders (in pursuit of their own Agendas) of course. Understand any specifics here are irrelevent to my overall point (which is why I'm not going to argue the points, even if I could) that all politicians are pretty much crooked and angling for something that usually isn't in your best interests no matter how it appears on the surface. I don't award positive points like some people. The best I can say is that he didn't sink any lower in my opinion due to this desician, while good in of itself for people's right to privacy, I doubt that his concern was in any way for the everyman. He was probably more concerned about unions and such on social networks and things like that, and how by being intergrated into social sites it becomes more difficult for people used to such technologies to organize and such. Unions (which tend to be a good thing in my opinion, despite my right wing leanings) tending to side with the left wing in most (but not all) cases. With big business being the backbone of a lot of right wing support anything that can limit them and undermine them also plays to the left.

 

[Epona]

I don't know what's more sad - the fact that companies and schools actually asked for this sort of information or that individuals actually gave it to them.

What's more sad is the companies using the fact that people need jobs to pulls shit like this.

 

[Roxas1359]

This is...a good law actually. Granted he's covering his ass on a lot of things but the fact that a good law actually passed in my state surprises me immensely.