Most companies presently avoid thinking about how their employee's tweets or Facebook status post might affect their business
Two issues are likely to affect eDiscovery products and mechanisms as soon as now.
The first is California’s recently passed eDiscovery regulation, which allows litigants to decline producing electronically stored information that they deem inaccessible – simply said, organizations can be only required to produce information that is reasonably accessible. Already Index Engines has announced that its products support the new California law.
The second issue is that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter may cause problems for companies that use the services to communicate with customers or exchange information among employees. There hasn’t been a major legal case yet challenging vendors to include Facebook comments and Twitter tweets in their eDiscovery capabilities – although a spa manager fired an employee over Facebook — but there will be soon as more companies adopt social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Most companies presently avoid thinking about how their employee’s tweets or Facebook status post might affect their business, but they should consider it. They ignored instant messaging for a while, but now they pay attention to it, just like they do e-mail. Already, state governments are addressing Facebook concerns. In fact, the Florida Attorney General’s Office released an opinion that municipal Facebook pages would violate Florida’s Public Records and Sunshine laws.
