Warning Issued on Blurring Personal and Company Data

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Not adopting formal corporate social media policies could present legal trouble for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), says law firm Purdy FitzGerald. Based on survey responses of 200 SMBs worldwide, collected by SpamTitan, while almost all allowed Internet access and some social networking applications in the workplace almost half (49 percent) admitted they had not taken even basic steps towards a social media policy such as deploying a Web filter.

“As business embraces social networking as a way to propagate messages and build their brands the line dividing personal and company data is becoming increasingly blurred,” explains Alastair Purdy, partner at Purdy FitzGerald Solicitors.  “The important thing is to take steps to protect yourself or your company as much as possible in advance. Failure to do so will potentially leave the SMB sector with significant legal issues over data ownership.”

Purdy notes that the legal position is at a very early stage of development. He offers the example of a recent case involving the United Kingdom arm of a U.S. business to business media publishing group (PennWell Publishing v Ornstein (2007 EWHC)) where it was ruled that the employer owned the outlook contacts of a former journalist employee, even though this list contained both work and personal contacts some of which had been brought to the company by the employee.

This blurring between work and personal becomes even more problematic in the social networking sphere. In another recent UK case, a recruitment consultant moved confidential contact information to his LinkedIn account whilst employed at Hays Recruitment. This decision was one of the first to highlight the tension between businesses encouraging employees to use social networking Web sites for work but then claiming that the contacts and content remain confidential information at the end of their employment.

“We are in a new era and it is time for every company to include a corporate social media policy alongside Internet usage guidelines as part of their employment terms,” states Ronan Kavanagh, CEO SpamTitan Technologies “Without a clear Internet policy many employees are unaware of the implications of sharing information on sites like Linkedin and if appropriate protection is absent many employers risk being drawn into costly legal wrangles with employees as time goes on.”

Today, it is often hard to tell with social media where an employee leaves off and the individual begins. As social media applications continue to be adopted in all size organizations, it is of growing importance to be very clear on what is personal data, and personal opinion verses company sanctioned opinion or company owned contacts. In addition, as SpamTitan points out, it is increasingly difficult to track who owns the data as social data content is aggregated from site to site.