Legal Affairs
Keeping tabs
How to keep confidential information within company walls
By Clare DeCapua
Smart Business Columbus | November 2009
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Traci A. McGuire, Director in the Litigation, Labor & Employee Relations and Health Care practices, Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter
Taking the proper steps to protect some of the most critical information for how you conduct your business is paramount to its livelihood. There’s a lot at stake.
“There’s a 2005 statistic that says 70 percent of identity theft starts with an employee stealing personal data from their employer,” says Traci A. McGuire, director in the Litigation, Labor & Employee Relations and Health Care practices at Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter. “Although you want to be trusting of your employees, you also have to realize the far-reaching nature of technology and who has access to that information. You have to assume that once it’s out there on the Internet, it is available to the whole world.”
Smart Business learned more from McGuire about steps businesses should take to properly monitor their critical information.
What are the risks businesses face by not regulating employee access to information?
The No. 1 concern is that employees can steal confidential information and do a lot of damaging things with it. There are a number of cases where employees steal confidential information about, for example, a manufacturing process or something that would be of interest to a competitor. If they go to work for a competitor, they have information that’s going to be used against you.
An employer may have one view of what is confidential information. On the other hand, an employee’s job may be just one slice of how a company operates, yet that employee may have access to information he or she does not realize is confidential. An employee may think it’s appropriate to share information in an e-mail or on Facebook as part of a routine dialog, or even just in conversation. But the company views that as an egregious breach of sharing confidential information because of who their clients and customers are.
