Corporate Social Media - Civil Lawsuit E-Discovery

http://ow.ly/8hhvb

An article by Benjamin Wright posted on the Electronic Data Records Law website.

This article discusses the case of Zimmerman v. Weis Markets Inc. and examines a scenario where an individual's social media network information is requested by an opposing party that is a corporation.

The article states, "The Pennsylvania court compelled the employee to give to the employer his Myspace and Facebook passwords, user names and log in names."  No reasonable expectation of privacy was found to exist.

The article states, "Historically, in civil ediscovery, it has been more common to require an email user to turn over relevant messages -- one-by-one –- not to turn over his log-on credentials so the opponent can access all messages in his email account.

The configuration of social media sites is complex, and privacy for particular bits of information can often be adjusted with a fine degree of precision. For example, in Google Plus, a user can “post” information on his page, but make it viewable by only one friend. In effect, the “post” is analogous to a private email message to that friend."

The article looks at the logic of the Zimmerman case, and wonders what will happen if it is applied to different facts, such as the use of instant messaging cloud based services such as Yammer.  The article states, "Under the logic of Zimmerman, I can imagine the corporation’s opponent arguing that it should be given powerful log-on credentials so it can broadly view the part of the service used “internally” by the corporation."