Who Owns Your Social Profiles?
Friday, January 13th, 2012No, this isn’t some conspiracy rant about how all of the information you put out on the Interwebs is owned by persons other than you. Nor is it a delving into the Privacy Policy of one social network or another. What it is is a legitimate, legal look at what happens when an employee at a company has a social profile built around them by that company and then the employee leaves.
Who then owns the profile?
A lawsuit happening in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania is asking just that question.
The Back Story
Before we look at the suit itself, let’s look at the story behind it. A startup called Edcomm was purchased by another company, Sawabeh. Shortly after the buyout, the founders of Edcomm were fired. This quickly lead to a lot of lawsuits.
The lawsuit dealing with a social media account specifically involves Dr. Linda Eagle, PhD. Other allegations include breaches of contract and so forth. It seems that there may have been an agreement with Sawabeh that Edcomm would remain autonomous and retain its corporate officers (namly Dr. Eagle and two others).
The social media account in question, though, is Dr. Eagle’s LinkedIn account.
The Allegations
Both sides have different stories. Sawabeh says that it was Edcomm policy to create and maintain, at their own expense, social media accounts on behalf of their employees – specifically corporate staff and sales. Eagle says the opposite is true and that the account is hers.
The other founders involved in this case also had LinkedIn accounts, but are not, apparently, being included in this case because neither of their accounts were accessible by Edcomm employees when the company terminated them. Eagle’s however, was.
Sawabeh alleges that when Eagle left, she continued to use her LinkedIn account (which they claim as theirs) and that she took other items associated with it (a phone number she transferred to another phone, etc). Again, Dr. Eagle denies these claims and says the phone number was hers as was the laptop they say she took.
What’s really at stake here are the contacts made and networking achieved through Eagle’s LinkedIn account.
Social Contacts and Ownership
The real issue, as far as the LinkedIn account is concerned, are the contacts it has. When Eagle left, the company immediately changed her profile to hold the name of another employee and their photograph. This was what started the lawsuit. The company claimed ownership of the account, but was not claiming ownership over Eagle’s likeness or profile, just her contacts list, it appears.
That says something. The issue isn’t whether or not someone owns their LinkedIn profile, but whether or not they own the networking contacts that can be made through it. In a more broad sense, this would apply to all business-centered social media accounts.
So what do you think? Should a company be able to own the contacts lists their employees have on their social media accounts if those accounts are maintained at company expense? How far does this reach? If you are accessing your social media from work and even contacting business clients through them, you are in many ways using corporate resources for those accounts. Doesn’t that mean they have some kind of ownership interest in them? Or not?
These are hard questions, but it’s obvious that they’re going to become more and more common with the rise of social media in our daily personal and business lives.
Technorati Tags: employment, marketing, social media
