Respect confidentiality

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By Lauren | May 21, 2010

For today’s post on keeping your business out of court, let’s address a topic that’s in the news with increasing frequency: breaches of confidentiality. AOL is reporting today that Facebook and other social media sites have been charged by Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman with sending personal information about its users to online advertising companies without their consent and regardless of their privacy settings. Edelman alleges that, because the ad companies receive data in the form of Web addresses from which clicks originated, it’s sometimes possible to deduce personal information about users from those addresses.

Not good at all.

Luckily for Facebook and its colleagues, any injury its users are likely to suffer will probably be minimal. They may become the target of unwanted ads, but that’s unlikely to do them any serious. For many companies, however, breaches of confidentiality are more serious. Businesses routinely have access to sensitive information about their clients and customers involving everything from health data to finance to trade secrets. And then there’s all the confidential information they collect on their employees, ranging from salaries to Social Security numbers. Releasing that kind of confidential information can do real harm … and can lead to serious litigation.

If your company collects confidential information on customers, clients, employees or all of the above, make sure you take proactive steps to keep that information under wraps. The key here is intentionality - your goal is to prevent anyone from getting access to confidential information unless you intentionally release it (and usually with the consent of the client, customer or employee involved). Build appropriate technological safeguards into your systems, back it up with clear non-disclosure policies and practices, and train your employees to be careful about what they disclose. Once the cat is out of the bag with confidential information, it can cost a world of time, trouble and legal fees to put it back.

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