I agree with you that it's silly to think of special laws being created specifically for facebook and the like. The problem with laws in all areas right now is that the internet and everything that came with it is so far "out there" that there's no way that lawmakers 50 years ago could imagine its impact. That's lead to now, where some laws are wholly inadequate to deal with real issues that we face.

In hiring laws, it's the applicants that are getting screwed by the lack of these laws, because their choices are to either acquiesce to the hiring manager's demands or lose the job. While it's easy for some people to say "I'd just walk out," a single mother who needs to feed her kids probably wouldn't be so quick to do so.

In the end, it's a matter of the job market. If the market were flush with openings, hiring managers would have to be on their best behavior for fear of losing a promising candidate. Right now though, that's unfortunately not the case, so it's up to regulation to give people some basic rights. In my opinion.

Asking for you to provide such information, or asking for your permission to request such information from third parties (as is done with employment or credit references, for instance) seems fine. What seems to cross a line here is asking for sufficient authority from you to permit them to pose AS YOU to a third party in order to access that information.

It's like if, in order to perform a credit check on you, they asked for your SSN, mother's maiden name, etc., and then applied for a couple of credit cards on your behalf to see if you get accepted.

There are ways to perform credit checks without committing identity theft. I would think there must be ways to obtain 'social references' without identity theft either.

I suppose that's a matter of anecdotal evidence on both of our ends. I have friends who have applied for jobs and had more than once been asked for this information- either to login to facebook in front of them, or provide login info. While maybe it's 3 or 4 times that I've heard of it personally, my impression is that it's probably wide-spread just looking at those statistics.