Five Potential Legal Concerns Around Google Plus

The MSP world is a buzz with Google Plus.  It was a topic of discussion at CompTIA Breakaway and I am sure Google Plus will be a topic on many other conferences and even within HTG peer group meetings.

With more than 20 million users, we must say Google+ is becoming hugely popular. But according to Joshua Kubicki who is the senior director of legal and corporate practices at Applied Discovery, the new social network is also raising a number of questions with legal implications from businesses about issues like potential policy changes and data retention issues. Applied Discovery is an e-discovery provider that works with corporations preparing for and responding to legal actions.

Allowing employees access to this latest platform from within your enterprise and on enterprise-issued devices? Here are five recommendations offered by Kubicki to help you keep problems at bay:

1. Include Google+ in Your Social Media Policy

With Google+ arriving on the scene, it is time you updated your social media policy for the platform. The policy should ensure employees understand which behaviors are appropriate and which are not on Google+, as well as potential consequences. Also important to note is that not everyone understands how to use Google+ privacy controls just yet. So, this issue should be addressed too.

2. Train Employees in Your Policies

You’ve updated your policies. Now what? Train your employees in those policies. The training should tell your employees everything; what the social media policy is, what’s allowed, what’s prohibited, how use is monitored and what enforcement actions may be taken. It should also encompass all the platforms available to employees, like Facebook and Twitter, and what the individual functions are. Don’t forget to make sure that the stakeholders communicate and understand the rights of both the employer and employee, though. And most importantly, review typical Terms of Use or Terms of Service examples to let employees know that data can be collected and sold to third parties and that they can be held responsible for posting prohibited content such as copyrighted work, defamatory language or spam.

3. Consider the Potential of Google+

Just because there’s no search button in Google+ doesn’t mean there won’t be. And when it does, what will it search?  Privately posted posts to your circles? Or publicly posted posts to everyone? And if in the future, Google has access to your private conversations and uses that information for advertising, how will you feel about that? You must consider things as these because you never know how your information will be used in the future.

4. Google+ Activity is Discoverable in Litigation

Google+ being a new network does not exclude it from the scope of discoverable information in litigation. All social media is considered electronically stored information and thus falls within the scope of potentially relevant information and Google+ is no different. So, an employee’s Google+ information has every chance used as evidence if a lawsuit arises. And since companies are required by law to preserve any potentially relevant data that is reasonably accessible, even companies may be required to capture and preserve this data.

5. Don’t Discount Google+ Yet Because of Privacy and Security Concerns

Google+ appears to be as safe as any other major platform, so you don’t have to be scared off. As Kubicki puts it, “You don’t want people being too careful – wade in, don’t jump in.” There are chances of glitches and patches in the future, though. However, with a solid social media policy and proper employee training, your business and Google+ should gel pretty well.