Why is it important for a company to manage its metadata?
Posted by Harsharn Makkar
A company must manage its metadata due to the risks associated with unintended disclosures. Many programs create data (invisible to the untrained eye) about data, which becomes a part of the visible text of the document in a single file. This unseen information if transferred to a recipient along with the document can have dire consequences for the company. For example, most documents reveal the author, creation dates and other similar information.
General information about the sender may be harmless under most circumstances. However, other information such as comments added to a document during editing stages by the company executive and/or lawyer may haunt the company if those comments reveal confidential information and/or a formula or a trial and/or negotiation strategy.
In addition, if employees are not educated about metadata, they may inadvertently post a document on the web that contains damaging information. For example, consider the consequences on your bottom-line if competitors gained information about your profit margins or manufacturing data from the workbook file posted on your website because an employee did not realize that a feature like fast save simply appends the changes at the end of the document rather than replace it with actual edited material. Lastly, metadata matters because sensitive data that becomes part of a given file may be stored off of company servers in various places as well as formats around the world without company’s knowledge or even capabilities to track it.
Why is it important for a company to have a blogging policy?
Posted by Harsharn Makkar
Like other personal policies, a blogging policy can help employees understand the issues employees can or cannot discuss on a company blog or a personal blog. A blogging policy can forewarned the employees about the consequences of policy violations. A well thought out blogging policy also provides recourse against the employee blogger who divulges sensitive information on a company or employee's personal blog. In addition, unless a company declares to the world its personnel policies ahead of time, it may not able to separate itself from the employee misconduct, which may result in loss of business reputation. Furthermore, such a policy can guide the company to establish clear standards so the company can take consistent actions in case of a violation rather than cherry pick, which may amount to condoning one employee's misconduct.
But even if company has a blogging policy in place, what should an employer restrict. Should an employer forbid all employee blogs? Should an employer forbid blogs that simply make reference to the company?
Should employer forbid blogs that make only derogatory comments?
There is no one answer that fits all since a company must weigh potential benefits against banning all blogs based on its goals, its products and services, and the applicable laws. For example, a company that bans all blogs may be going overboard since current body of law only permits employers to discipline an employee for comments based on race, gender, interference with business relationship, etcetera. More importantly though, if a company decides to censor its employee blogs, the censorship may impose liability in case of an improper posting that should have been filtered. And if the company does censor the content, what should be the standard for censorship.
As articulated already that even though there are many unanswered questions and the policy that an employer may establish may not protect the company from all types of allegations, nevertheless, it is advisable to have a policy as a company would any other personnel policy since an imperfect policy is better than none at all.