Google Your Company's Code of Conduct

There's a Forty Percent Chance It Fails To Address Data Privacy, and Why it Should

It is tough to escape Google. The search engine is ubiquitous. It finds whatever we are looking for in a split second. Google Maps helps us find the quickest route across town. Google Alerts lets us know when our friends or clients are in the news. Gmail accounts read our email and tells us when there is an advertisement that we may find interesting.

But when we use Google's services, we share personal information—what we are searching for, our location, and our identity. The same may be said for social networking sites such as Facebook. Personal data gathered in these contexts can include information such as an individual's name, address, phone number, email address, employee number, social security number, national identifier, or credit card number. How companies such as Google protect this information has generated attention from the Federal Trade Commission recently.

In March 2011, Google agreed to settle FTC charges that it was not doing enough to protect personal data when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, including violating the EU-US Safe Harbor framework. According to the FTC complaint, Google launched its Buzz network through its Gmail web-based email product and the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective, thus violating Google's own published privacy policy. For the first time, the FTC required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers' information.

But the information that consumers share with companies such as Google and Facebook pales in comparison to information that companies have about their employees and customers—social security, tax, and medical information. What are employers doing to protect this data?

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Source: law.com
By: Ryan McConnell, Margaret Cox Mousoudakis, and Katharine Southard