Diana Gregory

California HR-It's Full of Variety!

Electronic and Internet Use: Are Your Organization’s Policies and Practices Sufficient?

 

For competitive, economic and strategic reasons, businesses have greatly expanded the use of electronics in the workplace to conduct day-to-day operations both internally, with employees, and externally, with clients, customers, vendors and the public. Therefore, employees have access to, and need to use, company electronic systems and equipment for Internet, intranets, e-mail, voice-mail and other devices (such as PDAs or BlackBerries), to perform their jobs effectively. This can leave an employer vulnerable to: 

• Data integrity violations
• Theft of company intellectual and/or confidential information
• Computer viruses, worms and other malicious programs that can actually shut down the company’s whole internal network
• Unauthorized release of client or customer information
• Third party interception of confidential data
• Unauthorized downloads of material or software that has copyright protection
• Download and/or distribution of inappropriate material, such as pornography
• Employee complaints of privacy violations when inappropriate use of company systems is detected or discovered

Consequently, organizations need to develop and clearly communicate a comprehensive and up-to-date Electronic and Communications Systems Use policy. They also need to develop some form of enforcement and/or monitoring to ensure employees comply with the requirements.

Why Employers Should Be Concerned

There have been far too many recent cases of major private sector and public sector organizations which have had misuse of, misappropriation and/or distribution of customer, client and/or member personal information, including social security and account information. According to a 2002 report by TransUnion (one of the three major credit reporting companies in the nation):

“The number one underlying source of identity fraud is theft of employer records.” 

This is of great concern to an organization’s reputation, possible loss of business and exposure to litigation.

On the compliance side, there have been a number of recent laws requiring businesses and industries to specifically safeguard client, employee, patient and customer information.

Finally, there have also been many situations in which employees have downloaded and misused internal customer information for their own purposes, such as setting up their own business. One employer ran into difficulty when they terminated an employee for misconduct, then discovered when they tried to get into the files on the computer he had been using, that he had figured out a way to set up a private password. That company had to hire a forensic IT expert to break the password!

If you are interested in reviewing some cases relevant to this subject, check out:

1. U.S. v. Jeffrey Brian Ziegler
2. Mannacio v.General Electric Co.
3. Flanagan v. Flanagan, Calif. 
4. Watkins v. L.M. Berry & Co., 704 F.2d 577, 581 (11th Cir. 1983)
5. Deal v. Spears
6. Sanders v. Robert Bosch Corp., 38 F. 3d 736 (4^th Cir. 1994)

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