I swear, sometimes corporate policies are there to protect us from ourselves.
Reading this morning’s newsletter from Law Technology News, I came upon a story about an online employee chat room, OfficeLeaks, that’s been around since April of this year. You register for the service with your corporate email, and it provides Facebook-like communications with other employees in your own company (cf. its web site, which proclaims, “we [sic] provide free anonymous forums for employee-to-employee conversation. safely [sic] chat about ideas, office politics, and gossip with your coworkers.”
Only individuals registered to your corporation’s email can access that particular chat room, and OfficeLeaks promises to protect users’ anonymity. (“A good thing,” I can hear you saying, given the site’s potential to become a destination for the disaffected and disgruntled.)
But user beware – and not solely because of the significant time-suck factor, either. Just as with Facebook and Twitter, the content posted to OfficeLeaks can be subject to discovery in litigation — particularly in employer-employee disputes.
At heart is the fact that OfficeLeaks requires use of corporate e-mail. As we all know, most corporate policies explicitly prohibit the use of company-owned equipment (computers, software, email accounts, etc.) for personal use. These days, most employees also understand full well that their corporate email account does not come with a guarantee of privacy. The company has the right to search corporate email – and if and when it does, do you really want it to be able to match up to your corporate email account all those posts you sent off to OfficeLeaks in which you groused about the Boss from Hell? It wouldn’t take much research or sophistication to do exactly that.
But there are implications for repercussions far wider than these so-called “ankle-biter” cases, depending on the nature of the content that a user chooses to post. Case in point: the employee who chooses to post trade secrets or confidential company information. In fact, that’s exactly what put OfficeLeaks on the radar in the past couple of weeks. According to the LTN article, on August 2, an anonymous employee of Apple used OfficeLeaks to report that Steve Jobs was about to resign – this when Jobs’s official resignation was not released to the press until August 24, more than three weeks later.
It’s easy to imagine the potential damage that unauthorized release of confidential information could inflict. It’s also easy to imagine the employee who chooses to release such information being held liable. (FYI, no word thus far on whether Apple will be pursuing the employee who leaked the Jobs resignation.) Granted, the issue is still shaking out in the courts, among judges who are struggling to keep up with the technology, but in general, the rulings thus far have tended to find the information posted on social sites to be discoverable in litigation.
So employees, be careful what you post to those social sites. (And when you sign up, you might just want to use a personal email account – and your own computer!)
But there’s a takeaway for employers, too. The only reason OfficeLeaks was created in the first place was to fill an apparent need for those aforementioned “free anonymous forums for employee-to-employee conversation.” I.e. this is what happens if you’re a Fortune 500 company and haven’t gotten around to providing social media tools for your employees’ internal use: Your ever-ingenious employees go out and find an alternative like OfficeLeaks.
Or maybe not. Maybe your employees really did read their employee handbook once upon a time. And just maybe they’re sufficiently technically savvy and security-conscious to be rightfully skeptical of these guarantees of anonymity. Or maybe in these challenging economic times, employees are not about to sign up for services where they have the opportunity to post content that might put their jobs in jeopardy. Because according to the LTN story, OfficeLeaks now has a grand total of 1,500 registered users, working at 778 organizations.
You do the math: that’s less than two users per organization. That’s not a forum; that’s a venting session.