Washington State Passes Social Networking Privacy Legislation

On May 21, 2013, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law Senate Bill 5211, which with certain exceptions prohibits mandatory employee disclosure of ‘personal’ social-networking account information and profiles. The revised bill passed the Washington house and senate unanimously, and will go into effect on July 28, 2013. Washington thus became the ninth state to pass such legislation, which is intended to protect employee privacy in their non-public social networking activities.

On February 6th, we blogged about SB 5211’s introduction and original text, and we expressed concern that it was too broad to protect legitimate employer interests in their proprietary and physical assets. For example, the bill as originally written did not exempt good-faith employer investigations of employee misconduct, or legitimate employer monitoring of its own networks and hardware.

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