Social Media and Technology

OPC BYOD GuidelinesI’ve written several posts about BYOD in the past, and continue to believe that for many workplaces, BYOD will be difficult if not impossible to resist. However, it won’t be news to anyone that BYOD raises a full array of privacy and security issues related to the potential blurring and blending of employee personal information and business/customer information on devices.

Recently, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, along with the Alberta and British Columbia Information and Privacy Commissioners, have published guidelines to assist organizations considering or implementing BYOD policies.

While the publication does not introduce anything overly novel, it does provide a good roadmap in one document, a roadmap with quite a bit of weight if you are trying to prove your organization did its due diligence around implementing a prudent BYOD program.Continue Reading Privacy Commissioner’s BYOD Guidelines

On Wednesday, the Canadian federal government introduced Bill C-13, a ‘new’ cyberbullying bill to address the increasingly harmful effects of intimate images going viral online.  The cyberbullying proposals are part of a wider omnibus bill that amends a few acts, including the Criminal Code and Evidence Act. 

Many of the cyberbulling provisions are in

Last week, I conducted a workshop on implementing a successful “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) program at the Canadian Institute’s Privacy Law & Compliance Conference.  I met a wonderful group of privacy experts who had plenty to contribute to the discussion.

We talked about the benefits, risks and costs of permitting employees to use their personal device to perform work-related tasks, which typically includes accessing the company’s network.  Over half the group was in the public sector and regularly handled very sensitive, confidential personal information.

The private sector attendees in the group had an equally strong concern about protecting highly sensitive and confidential business information.  At the end of the day, most organizations, regardless of how open they may or may not be, require a certain level of security around their data, intellectual property and personal information.

So how to implement a successful BYOD program?

Continue Reading Implementing a Successful BYOD Program

A couple of readers have asked to what extent US based social media cases will apply in Canada.  We don’t yet have a large body of social media cases in Canada (other than run of the mill termination cases involving social media), so there tends to be a lot of discussion up here about US

Who owns the social media content created and maintained in the course of employment? Work product is traditionally the proprietary interest of the employer. But there’s something different about social media content. 

A blog created by a company employee during company time on a company computer with a focus on the company’s products may be straightforward – the blog and its content are owned by the company.

LinkedIn: Where the battle will likely take place

But what about LinkedIn?  I’ve blogged about the @PhoneDog_Noah case and the ownership of Twitter followers in the past, but the future battle will no doubt be focused on LinkedIn. While the LinkedIn User Agreement is between the individual and LinkedIn, the reality is, a key purpose of LinkedIn is to either generate business in one’s current occupation (i.e. increase your employer’s business), or to generate business and connections for the next position (i.e. for the next employer). 

The question is whether the development of connections and of one’s network in general is as a result of one’s individual personality, or as a result of one’s association with a company name. In other words, do people connect with me because I’m a lawyer at XYZ LLP, or because of my individual personality/voice? I suspect in most cases, for most people, it’s a combination of the two. 

And it’s this combination that makes LinkedIn different than a traditional Rolodex. A company’s customer list is the company’s property, and a departing employee cannot take that list with her. 

But in the modern world of social media, do you take your LinkedIn connections with you? I’m guessing 100% of us believe that we do – it’s our own individual account. And LinkedIn would agree. But will your employer?

You Own My Relationships?!

A Gen-Y employee would find it rather unseemly that their relationships with their colleagues, friends, and general network is somehow owned by one’s employer. None of us expect to stay with the employer for 30 years anymore. Compiling, developing and working hard to nurture our network of relationships is a critical tool of business that we need to take with us. 

Conversely, employers have a good reason to assert a proprietary interest over its customer list. 

Let the battle begin.

Stay tuned to my next post where I will debrief about the Eagle v Morgan case, one of the few cases out there that has gone to trial on the issue of LinkedIn content ownership.    

 

Continue Reading Who Owns Work-Related Social Media?

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In this fourth piece on Bringing Your Own Device to work, I build upon my past posts that set out the benefits, costs and risks of BYOD.

So you’ve now decided to jump in (or some other reckless decision maker in your organization has), and you now have to develop your BYOD program.  Here are