A recent practice has emerged in which employers are asking potential employees to hand over the login data—user name and password—for their Facebook (News - Alert) accounts. This is being done to get a better insight into the potential hire's character, but Facebook earlier today dropped word that this is a terrible idea, and had plenty of reasons why.

The trend started showing up recently, with potential employers wanting to look over people's Facebook pages, and realizing that the best way to see the versions that weren't sanitized for public consumption was to ask for Facebook account information, allowing the potential employer to log in as the account holder and have a look around.

Naturally, this raised the hackles of virtually every privacy wonk on the face of the Earth, but then, Facebook itself issued a statement containing plenty of harsh language for those employers who may want to follow this practice themselves. Employers, said Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, may not be adequately trained to handle the extremely private information that a Facebook account comprises (especially when it's set to friends-only access, which is why many companies would want the login data in the first place). This in turn could lead to a variety of legal troubles, starting with discrimination suits and leading to other problems from there.

For instance, an employer might find that a person being considered is a member of a protected group of people, such as people older than a certain age or the like. If they then fail to hire that person, knowing they're part of that protected group, it becomes fodder for claims of discrimination, possibly even going all the way into legal action. Moreover, once the employer actually accesses the information in question, they have some legal responsibilities to protect said information, and failure to do so may once again pose legal headaches for the company in question.

Some have even noticed language in the Facebook terms of service that, should you solicit passwords from others, Facebook reserves the right to terminate your account. And considering how many companies depend on Facebook access for marketing, that's a step that should give most any prospective employer looking for passwords pause. Further, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal is reportedly at work on legislation making such a practice illegal.

And when you add all these separate factors together, what you get is that asking employees for Facebook passwords represents much greater potential loss than can be offset by any gain in information from the employee's Facebook page.