My Face Or Spacebook, Understanding The Implications Of Social Networking

In August 2010, Personnel Today reported that over 50% of employees revealed they used social networking sites within working hours with about 6% spending more than an hour per day on these sites with the associated loss of productivity. (Personnel Today 5th August 2010)

This follows newspaper headlines in July which reported the fact that there are over 26 million Facebook users within the UK, to say nothing of other social networking sites such as My Space, Twitter and Bebo. At the same time the business network LinkedIn has a worldwide membership of 65 million. At least some of these individuals will be working in your organisation. The growth of social networking sites creates not only advantages but also raises a number of legal issues and potential headaches for employers.

LinkedIn

To the uninitiated, the primary function of LinkedIn is to share business connections with other members. As a consequence it is much easier for individuals to access and retain commercially sensitive data about business contacts.

For example, a salesman can diligently enter each customer as a connection on LinkedIn. If at a later date he wishes to work for a competitor, then with a few clicks of the keyboard he can access his full list of LinkedIn connections.

This raises a number of legal issues surrounding the protection of confidential data and compliance with express and implied obligations of fidelity, confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-competition. The employer in this situation faces a number of hurdles if he wishes to protect his information, not least whether the connections on LinkedIn can properly be regarded as the employer's confidential information once they are on LinkedIn. Do the connections belong to the employer and are they confidential?

Although untested there is a strong argument that they are not in fact confidential, not least because they are readily accessible to anyone with an internet connection and rarely contain information which may be regarded as confidential.

Whilst an individual's profile may not be confidential there seems a stronger argument for the way information is gathered together, for example, a list of connections may create a proprietary interest. Unfortunately for the employer the list of connections will already have been disclosed to a large number of other connections, most likely, with the employer's consent.

"Traditional" methods of controlling social networking sites such as blocking or banning...