eDiscovery’s Big Concerns: Social Media and The Cloud

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2011-10-24 13:00:00  Earlier this month, I had a chance to participate in the panel, “Cloud, SharePoint, and Social Media: Discovery on the Next Data Frontier” at the LitCon 2011 show. My fellow panelists were Larry Briggi of FTI Consulting, Leigh Isaacs of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and James Zucker, Esq. of Hogan Lovells.  We’ve done this panel several times at conferences and on webinars and I learn something new every time.  At the LitCon show, it was clear that social media is quickly becoming one of the biggest issues in eDiscovery.  Mr. Zucker’s list of cases where social media is involved keeps growing.One of the important things we hit on in in the panel is the need for policy.  But, not only do companies need policies on social media usage, collection and preservation of social media content, and retention policies for how to store social media content, but the providers themselves need to be more transparent about their own policies.  And so it was with great interest that I read this article that Leigh Isaacs forwarded my way today – “Facebook to face 100,000 Euro Fine for Keeping Archives of Deleted Data.”FaceBook users may delete data, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook has a way of making sure that data is actually destroyed.  In this one case, an individual shows how his privacy could be violated.  Imagine what could happen if a huge corporation could prove mishandling of data?  Because, at the end of the day, this issue extends well beyond Facebook and other social media providers; truly any cloud vendor could face similar charges.  Think of all the small businesses that rely on QuickBooks Online.  I seriously doubt that anyone asked Intuit about the company’s data retention policies for QuickBooks data.To that end, we are currently conducting a cloud survey to gauge whether or not these issues are on the radar of eDiscovery and information management professionals.  We hope you will consider taking this survey – it only takes 5 minutes and all respondents will be registered for a chance to win a Kindle Fire.  The data will really help us in demanding transparency from cloud providers (who we are also trying to interview to better understand their current policies).