Are Your Social Network Contacts Owned By Your Employer?

I read recently on Peter Gold's Talent Technology Blog and in yesterday's Daily Telegraph that a former employee, Mark Ions, of recruitment firm Hays has been ordered to hand over business contacts built up on his personal page of the social networking site Linked In.

The Telegraph article says, "The decision is one of the first to highlight the tension between businesses encouraging employees to use social networking websites for work but then claiming that the contacts remain confidential information at the end of their employment".

The ramifications of this decision are quite scary. While it is implicitly obvious that if your firm has invested in CRM technology like Salesforce.com or ACT! as a business tool to manage your business contacts and interactions that you regard the contacts and information contained as the company's property and therefore are covered by confidential information clauses in your contract, it is almost certainly not the understanding of most employees that the business contacts they accrue on sites like Linked In are also bound by these contract clauses.

Now there may be special cases at work here. The recruitment industry has particularly taken to sites like Linked In which has revealing profiles of over 23 million people with current job titles, career information and sometimes contact information. It has been a particular gold mine for recruiters to not only find potential candidates for jobs but also to network as widely as possible to a) increase their chances of getting recruitment assignments and b) increase their working database of potential candidates. If you were to look at certain recruiter contacts on Linked In you would quickly realise that their 2500+ connections cannot possibly be anything than their office Rolodex of business contacts.

How will this affect Social Networking in Business?

This is perhaps the most important question. Linked In's official response to the decision was from 'a spokesman' who said that its members should not use the site to publish information that they have no right to disclose, such as insider, proprietary and confidential information. "It is important that customers abide by their current employment contract and ensure that they have the right to use the information provided."

This is a surprisingly uncontroversial statement from a company that thrives on business networking. This is a company that has built up its 'customer' list based on individuals signing up and freely entering their information on a publicly-viewed site knowing full well that their details can be viewed by other members of the site. Further many of the members have listed their interests as seeking new job opportunities. In other words, they could be construed to be 'fair game'. In most instances, sign up is for free. Similarly, the search facilities to find people by job function, keywords, locations, company names are quite sophisticated and lend themselves to recruiters or similar browsing to find juicy contacts for their next sale. Linked In has positioned itself well to cater for both needs, so why the non-committal response to this case that damages freedom of use by the individual?

Linked In has more recently started working with Corporations to look at providing some different services for companies. Advertising for jobs and services is one important area but there is no doubt that Linked In is slowly, having accumulated a vast list of business contacts from around the globe, repositioning itself as an online CRM system of sorts.

In Linked In's attempts to further 'monetise' its member base it is now marketing itself as a Corporate service having grown from a focus on the individual, not worrying who the person worked for. It is a subtle change in focus that justifies the spokesperson's statement perhaps. But perhaps gone are the days of Linked In being a Social Network, it is now very much a Business Network and is in the camp of the employer.

Ramifications

I should mention that I am not a lawyer and so consider this as my personal opinion only and should not be considered a legal opinion.

The clear ramifications are for those who do their prospecting via Linked In as part of their company's business. Recruiters fall slap bang into this category and Hays is the first to make a call on this and test it in law - with a successful outcome. But does this also affect everyone else who uses Linked In or similar networks at least in part for prospecting for business on behalf of their company or themselves in company time?

I think it does and certainly it calls for people to review their strategy in using Linked In at a personal level in order to increase their business network and win more business for their companies. Recruiters should certainly be concerned about this and seek clarification from their employers. I would suggest that employers should also be more clear on what constitutes confidential information as contract clauses are notoriously woolly and online social/business networking is a relatively new phenomenon which needs some special attention. Sharpen your pencils HR managers.

The interesting aside is how Mr. Ion's solicitors (Jonathan Stokes Solicitors) presented the case on his behalf. From my point of view, I would be concerned about data that is not within the Corporate firewall or VPN and freely available on the internet being considered company confidential, particularly if it has not been paid for.

Rivalry

Linked In has been slow to monetise its membership from a Business-To-Business stand point. There are firms such as Jigsaw who have made a business on exchanging 'business cards' between contacts to build up data lists which can be filtered and then rented for mailing use. There is already plenty of legal thought about this type of service as the act of giving someone your business card or details has an inherent confidentiality associated with it and it does imply that the data is not to be distributed without permission - yet Jigsaw relies on that free distribution.

Linked In seeks the best of both worlds. It wants the data to be freely available and has the consent of its members to make it so, but it also wants to side with employers who encourage its employees to use Linked In to further its business, ultimately because it wants those employers to spend money with Linked In and therefore give some comfort on use of data afterwards.

Should we be scared?

I think so. This precedent has wide ranging implications beyond Linked In, although it is the major business to business network at the moment, others like Plaxo, Xing, Konnects, Viadeo etc fall into similar categories. With the rise of instances of Corporations involving themselves in networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Bebo and the rise of the Corporate position of 'Chief Networking Officer' the emphasis on the 'Social' is moving toward the 'Business' in networking.

Then again, to monetise all those juicy names, we knew it always had to. The party may well have been spoilt.

Footnote

Yesterday Linked In by coincidence raised finance of $53m valuing the company at a tad over $1bn. In discussing the implications of the ruling in favour of Hays, a friend pointed out the possible implications for each of us who has a profile on Linked In. We postulated that if Hays claimed some kind of 'possessary' title over the data accrued by the employee, then we wondered if that was made aware to the people who had connected with the Hays employee? Or indeed were any of us by connecting to anybody who solicited a connection, implying that our contact information could be used by a third party (i.e. the person's company) to use the data in whatever way it wished - for instance to be added to the corporate mailing list? Or indeed are we always assuming that we are connecting with an individual who we are think will help us achieve some of our goals like get a new job?

I am not a legal person, but it certainly I have experienced daft emails from recruitment companies advertising inappropriate jobs because of their loose keyword selection. Am I now to assume that when I connect to anyone at Linked In I am implicitly handing over my personal data in Linked In and contact information for use by a third party to do whatever they wish with? Or is there a law that protects me here in the UK or abroad? I know some will leap up and shout 'Data Protection' but the question might arise, where is the data stored in the UK or USA and so where is the governing law? There may be perfectly good answers to these concerns but at a time when Linked In have raised $56m is there a potential that the sheen on the service has been tarnished?