This whole situation with facebook passwords shows the difference between the states and Europe, imho. I have hard time imagining European companies asking for a facebook password. Whether it's legal or not.
Even in the worker-hating, employer-loving USA, it's relatively uncommon. As many have posted here on Hacker News, actually looking at an employee's social network account (other than, maybe, LinkedIn) can open up all kinds of liabilities for discrimination lawsuits.
So banning the practice really just serves to codify what anyone with common sense was working out in their head anyway.
UK: Yup, this sounds absolutely planet zog. People do get themselves into trouble through facebook, twitter and blogging (see below), but employers don't ask for passwords, that is for sure.
Actually, he was offered his job back, but didn't take it up. It's unclear if the offer was before or after he won an appeal against Waterstone's dismissal (it is not unusual to get an offer for reinstatement but still run the employment tribunal process to win compensation for the dismissal). But in the meantime he'd gotten an offer from Forbidden Planet to run their blog, and apparently reached a settlement with Waterstone's instead.
As far as I can tell, he still runs the Forbidden Planets blog (as well as his own at http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/ ).
It is almost certainly illegal in the European Union.
The EU Data Protection (i.e. privacy) law means that if you're collecting personal information (in any way, not just computer), then you have to:
(a) Explain why you are asking for it, and you have to give a legitimate reason why you want to know it. You cannot store information you cannot explain why you need it
(b) You then have to store the personal information in a secure manner. So you can just ask for access to someone's Facebook account and then share it around the office.
(c) The personal data requested must be proportionate to what you want to do. I doubt "tell us everything about your social life" is acceptable for just hiring a person for a job.
(there might be other reasons why this is against data protection law, but I can't think of any off the top of my head)
Not to mention the much stronger employee rights (e.g. you cannot not hire someone based on family status, sexuality, etc.), and it would be much harder to prove you didn't use that information if you accessed it. (Employee protection is stronger in EU, none of this "at will" crap)
As far as I know - and a quick google search confirms this - it is typical for a European resume/CV/job application to include the applicant's age, marital status, number of children, and even a photo (race/ethnicity).
(Not certain if your post implied that European companies are more privacy-minded, just wanted to point out that that's debatable).
There are no typical European CVs. Every country will have its own style.You won't see any pictures in the UK for example, but it's still not uncommon to see one in PL.
Photos are commonly attached to resumes in the following countries: Germany, Austria, Greece, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Spain. Date of birth or age: Italy, Germany, Austria, France Finland, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Czech Rep, Hungary, Romania, Greece. Similar for Eastern European countries, or for marital status and/or number of children, place of birth, etc. Does that cover enough Europe/personal information irrelevant to the candidate's ability to perform their job for you?
If anything, the UK CVs stand out among European CVs as being much more like the US resumes, i.e. less invasive. Back to the context of this thread, for the parent to point to Europe as a protector of privacy for the job seeker is disingenuous.
