> You're being playful about this, but I'm legitimately worried about a future where job candidates are rejected purely because they didn't offer their social media identities or passwords.

Demanding a social media identity or password is a great idea if you want to paint a huge target on your back for a discrimination lawsuit.

Said social media account will contain a lot of information about whether or not you are a member of a protected class. Good luck proving that you didn't use it in your hiring decision.

Doesn't this just mean people will eventually start building artificial social presences to point to instead of simply lacking any sort of presence?

I assume that many already do this. There's certainly a number of business opportunities in this, and it's only a matter of time before it turns into an arms race: people building fake social-media identities, other parties (governments, big internet players) deploy AI to distinguish these from real,... rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

If I still cared enough about writing software I'd probably do a startup around some of this. Instead I'm writing SF about it.

Do you have any sources that describe the asking for social media access in job applications? As a software engineer I am very lucky with the amount of jobs that is available to me, so if I were asked this I would walk out of the interview immediately. My only fear is for all those people who don't have a choice because they are part of a pool of hundreds of applications (psychology graduates for example, at least here in the Netherlands). Some employers just want to squeeze every last drop of dignity out of their employees, it is disgusting.

I've only read headlines and heard from friends working in larger cities for larger companies experiencing this, so obviously it's not something which is happening all the time everywhere, and based on my quick research it seems like a lot of news came out around 2012 about this issue: https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/your-facebook-p...

I would act the in the same manner you would as well, it's not worth working for a company if they don't have some very basic principles and it's a huge red flag. If they don't respect your privacy in the interview, they probably wont respect it in day to day business. But just like you explained we have to be careful because there's a lot of people who don't really have a choice, especially in today's job market here in Australia; a lot of people would have to decide between privacy and their ability to pay the power, rent, food, etc.

This reminds me of Ben Eltons book "Blind Faith". The protagonist is confronted because he is not streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website. Clearly he must be hiding something.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2164457.Blind_Faith