Source: https://www.technologylawsource.com/articles/social-media-1/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 04:56:04+00:00

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Are you a criminal because you share your Netflix password?
The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit continues to decide high profile cases that interpret the key provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This post summarizes two July decisions from the court—one that sent the internet into a frenzy, and one that somewhat assuaged those fears.
Harmless rap or dangerous threat? The question that has Chief Justice Roberts quoting Eminem.
If I look you in the eye and tell you with a flick of my wrist I will slit your throat, you will likely call the police and have me arrested. If I threaten to kill my co-workers, or plant a bomb in a kindergarten class, or shoot my spouse, I will lose my job, my marriage and my freedom. But, if I make those same egregious threats in the form of a rhyme and post them on Facebook it is “artistic expression” and protected free speech.
That is the basis of the argument Anthony Elonis made to the U.S. Supreme Court in a ground-breaking case that is the Court’s first examination of the limits of free speech on social media. Oral arguments were heard Dec. 3, 2014, and a decision is expected by the end of June. That decision will have far-reaching implications, not just for battered spouses, but for employers who want to fire an employee who uses social media to harass and threaten co-workers.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Advertising Practices has recently finalized its investigation into Cole Haan’s “Wandering Shoe” contest wherein contestants could enter the contest by creating Pinterest boards titled “Wandering Sole” and including five shoe images from Cole Haan’s Wander Sole Pinterest Board as well as five images of contestants’ “favorite places to wander.” Contestants also were instructed to use #WanderingSole in each pin description. The contestant with the most creative entry would, under the contest rules, be awarded a $1,000 shopping spree from Cole Haan.
Facebook updates policy regarding remembering loved ones, which begs the question: Is legislation over digital assets necessary or inevitable?
A few days after we posted “Facebook’s ‘Look Back’ videos send reminder: Get digital accounts in order before death,” which provided guidance to digital account users on how to make plans for their digital accounts before death, Facebook announced a policy change regarding how it would maintain the profiles of its users who have passed away in an effort to better preserve their legacies on the site.
As we explained in the post, before the change, when a user’s account was memorialized, the profile was restricted to “friends” only. This precluded anyone who was not a “friend” of the user from seeing or commenting on the profile. With Facebook’s new change, which became effective Feb. 21, 2014, Facebook will now maintain the visibility of the user’s content as-is, which will allow people to view the memorialized profiles in the same manner consistent with the user’s privacy settings.
The reason, as Facebook explained: “We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.” This means that if a user’s profile was publicly visible before death, it will remain that way after death. This gives Facebook user another reason to stay on top of Facebook’s privacy settings and adjust accordingly.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Facebook created a “Look Back” video for each of its users. A father mourning the loss of his recently-deceased son uploaded a video of himself to YouTube pleading with Mark Zukerberg and Facebook to see his son’s video. The father deemed his request a “shot in the dark,” but Facebook answered and informed the father it was creating a memorial video for his deceased son.
The same day I read about this, I had a reminder on my Facebook homepage reminding me to say “Happy Birthday” to one of my Facebook friends. Unfortunately, that friend passed away a few weeks ago, and the would-be-friendly Facebook reminder ended up being a painful one.
This past summer, the University of Amsterdam launched a new, week-long Privacy Law and Policy Summer Course related to the Internet, electronic communications, and online and social media. Course faculty included European and U.S. academics, European regulators and the head of the global privacy law practice at an international law firm, among others. Course participants consisted of 25 legal practitioners and post-graduate researchers from the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Kenya and other countries. I was lucky enough to serve as a co-organizer and faculty member for the course.
Taken together, the nine mini-seminars that constituted the backbone of the course provide a snapshot of developments in privacy law and policy in Europe and in the United States, and how they relate to one another. This should be of interest to U.S. lawyers and others who work in the areas of privacy law, compliance and management. What follows is a brief description of some key takeaways from the week, and an attempt to pull them together into a broader perspective.
Here are my thoughts on key e-discovery cases decided in September, including a decision showing how a company can defensibly delete data that it no longer needs, the recent case “trend” of courts requiring the disclosure of the sources and search terms used to find discoverable ESI, and a couple of cases addressing the issue of “possession, custody and control,” one involving a parent-subsidiary relationship and the other involving the personal computers and electronic devices of former and current employees.
In addition to the posting of the proposed discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for public comment, August was packed with a number of interesting e-discovery decisions. Here are my thoughts on key e-discovery cases decided last month, including another spoliation blockbuster from Judge Shira Scheindlin and rulings on e-discovery costs, search terms, proportionality and privacy.
Sekisui American Corp. v. Hart, No. 12 Civ. 3479 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 15, 2013). Judge Scheindlin considered the “appropriate penalty for a party that — with full knowledge of the likelihood of litigation — intentionally and permanently destroyed the email files of several key players.” Based on Judge Scheindlin’s analysis of the facts, she reversed the magistrate judge’s order declining to award sanctions and instead ordered that an adverse jury instruction be given at trial.
For many years, we have been advising our clients that, in addition to the laws addressing sweepstakes and contest promotions, they must also be aware of the Facebook’s promotion guidelines if they wished to link their sweepstakes promotion to the company Facebook presence. While that remains true, Facebook has now made it much easier for companies to run promotions through Facebook. Prior to Facebook changing the terms of their guidelines on Aug. 27, promotions were not allowed to be run directly through Facebook or Facebook’s functionality. Instead, running a contest or sweepstakes promotion required companies to use a third-party (or in-house created) application run on Facebook’s platform. Facebook posted an announcement of the changes which also explained some of the remaining limitations (such as prohibitions in the new guidelines against encouraging inaccurate tagging for purposes of a promotion). The amended guidelines also include certain other requirements with respect to clarifications that Facebook is not a sponsor of and does not endorse the promotion and a release of Facebook from all liability.
A federal court in California has held that subpoenas served on Google and Yahoo! seeking the subscriber and usage information associated with 68 email addresses did not infringe on the subscribers’ First Amendment rights or their right to privacy. Chevron Corp v. Donziger, No. 12-mc-80237 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 22, 2013). The subpoenas also did not violate the Stored Communications Act (SCA). According to the court, the subscribers “vastly overestimate[d] the amount of legal protection accorded to the subscriber and usage information associated with their email addresses.” Chevron, slip op. at 32.
Although the [subscribers] may believe that using their email addresses will protect their identities, that belief is simply not reflected by the reality of the world we live in. Email addresses are labels we voluntarily present to the outside world, through which we allow the world to contact us, and in that way identify us.
By way of background, Jewell v. Aaron’s Inc., is a nationwide,1,700+ FLSA collective action pending in the Northern District of Georgia. In the suit (Complaint accessible here), the class plaintiffs (current and former employees of Aaron’s) claim they were not paid for their 30-minute meal periods. As you might imagine, with that many plaintiffs discovery has been difficult. So with that, the parties got creative. They were able to work together to narrow the issues and determined that of the 1,700+ class members, discovery would only be served and responded to by 87 of the opt-in plaintiffs (the “Discovery Plaintiffs”). I won’t go into all the details about that discovery (you may read the Defendant’s Memorandum in Support of Motion for Court Approval of Discovery Request to a Small Number of Randomly-Selected Opt-In Plaintiffs here), because I want to focus on the social media portion of the discovery dispute.
When we think about the issues that employers have been struggling with relating to employee use of personal mobile devices for work, thoughts of data security, trade secret protection, record retention, and even FLSA compliance immediately come to mind — or at least my mind. But, I bet you wouldn’t anticipate what allegedly happened in Lazette v. Kulmatycki, a case decided by the federal court in the Northern District of Ohio on June 5, 2013. In Lazette, the plaintiff alleged that, after plaintiff left her employment, she returned her company-issued BlackBerry (which she used and refers to in her complaint as her “phone”), but did not have the phone wiped. The phone apparently ended up in the clutches of her former supervisor, who, during the ensuing 18 months, allegedly read without her knowledge or authorization 48,000 emails sent to her personal Gmail account. In addition, the plaintiff alleged that the supervisor disclosed the contents of some of the emails to others.
Recently our sister blog The Employer Law Report told you about Vine, a mobile video application owned by Twitter that allows users to capture and share short looping six-second videos on Twitter. The app will no doubt cause corporations more social media headaches as employees start recording Vine workplace videos — especially with 13 million users since the app was rolled out five months ago.
In an ADA employment discrimination case, a federal court recently denied a defendant’s request to compel the plaintiff to provide authorizations for all of her social media accounts, but still ordered the production of any social media postings relevant to the plaintiff’s claimed emotional distress damages. See Giacchetto-v-Patchogue-MedfordUnion, No. CV 11-6323 (E.D.N.Y. May 6, 2013). The court followed the approach taken in Howell v. Buckeye Ranch, Inc., No. 11-CV-1014 (S.D. Ohio Oct. 2012), and applied a “traditional relevance analysis,” stating “[t]he fact that Defendant is seeking social networking information as opposed to traditional discovery materials does not change the Court’s analysis.” Giacchetto, slip op. at 3.
On June 19, Porter Wright launches its four-part seminar series covering technology topics at the forefront of today’s businesses. Technology Law Source will continue to cover these topics in future blog posts, including navigating through U.S. and international laws, regulations and standards.
The Federal Judicial Center recently published the Sixth Edition of the Benchbook for U.S. District Court Judges. For the first time, the Benchbook includes a section on civil case management, including how to address e-discovery issues. The Benchbook also adds new jury instructions regarding the use of social media and electronic devices by jurors during trials.
Describing it as a “rather novel issue,” a federal court recently held that a former employee’s public posts on his personal Facebook page did not constitute solicitation of his former co-workers under the terms of his non-solicitation agreement with his former employer. [See Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. v. Cahill, No. 12-CV-346, Doc. 31 (Jan. 22, 2013), Report and Recommendation affirmed and adopted, Doc. 32 (Feb. 12, 2013)] The court further noted that invitations sent to former co-workers to join Twitter were not solicitations under the agreement because the invitations did not request the co-workers to “follow” the former employee, they did not contain any information about the new employer, and they were sent by Twitter instead of as targeted email blasts by the former employee.

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