No one said it was illegal in here
While I am all for employers looking up candidates, asking someone for their email address and password is just ridiculous. Most people from personal experience share the same password with their facebook as they do with the email thats used to login to facebook. The ammount of privacy invasion that can occur from handing over this information is just insane. Not only that you’re not just giving someone the ability to look at your wall or posts, they can go through you’re messages, photos everything, that is a huge privacy violation in my opinion.
The simple and easy way to do this would simply have a prerequisite when you apply that says something along the lines of “We do thorough background checks to ensure the integrity of the employees working for us and representing our company, we ask that if it is not already, please make your social networking profiles public or be prepared to login to your profile for us so that we may better screen candidates and speed up the process”
Sure may cause a lot of people to say fuck this and not even bother, but chances are those people would have said no anyways.