If you want a job with the city of Bozeman,  be prepared to hand over the addresses of any websites you participate in, any forums you use, and any chat rooms you visit, as well as your Facebook, Goggle, MySpace, YouTube and other accounts, along with your usernames and passwords.

What about your right to privacy?  Tough.

From Montana’s News Station:

The City takes privacy rights very seriously, but this request balances those rights with the City’s need to ensure employees will protect the public trust, according to city attorney Greg Sullivan.

“So, we have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City,” Sullivan said.

Sounds like voyeurism to me. On Facebook, this gives them the ability to see not only what you’ve been up to and what pictures you’ve posted, but to see the record of all your friends, as well.

Why usernames and passwords?  Why not just google you and see what turns up?

What this does in actuality is give the city the opportunity to impersonate you.  How else can they inspect your moral character if not by presenting themselves as you to your friends?

Want to torpedo a rival for love or money?  Take that information, log into the other guy’s IRC channel, and start passing out porn under his nickname.  Upload copyrighted material to YouTube.  Disclose industry gossip on the stocks and bonds message boards at Yahoo.  Log into his blog and talk about the drunken orgy you and your dog hosted last weekend.  And do it all under his identity.

But you have no choice but to trust them not to do any of that.  Not if you need a job.

That’s more than a privacy violation.  In this economy, that’s extortion.  And I hope to hell someone sues city hall out from underneath them for it.