Communication through new media is increasingly cited in lawsuits. In a recent survey, 52% of attorneys said they expect an increase in lawsuits related to social media. What exactly does that mean though and how can you ensure that the communication you and your employees participate will be compliant with the local laws and regulations?
What is New Media?
Gone are the days that all communication had a physical paper trail. The invention of email has changed the landscape of communication, and that landscape is continually changing today. Now private and group messages can take place over Teams, Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook and SO many more platforms.
These days, you can get an email from a person, respond via text, they can reply back via Facebook messenger, and the conversation can be scattered across multiple platforms and environments.
What is Required From Organizations Regarding New Media?
New regulations require that all of these communications are kept and secured in case of litigation. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requires that you identify any relevant data, preserve it, and ensure that it’s not deleted or changed. However, you also need to comply with privacy laws that state if a person requests it, you need to remove all of their personal information from your systems.
Gartner reports that archived personal data represents the largest privacy risk for most organizations. That means communications across all of the platforms, that are being saved to comply with Federal regulations can actually get you in trouble with local privacy laws.
What is the Solution?
Fortunately, as communication technology continues to forge ahead, so does the technology to keep track of it all. Unified Information Archiving (UIA) can help you maintain a high level of ongoing, passive compliance.
How does UIA help?
- Pre-enabled six-year retention policies that can be extended to meet any compliance requirement
- Automated tagging, indexing, and out-of-the-box search templates for automated noncompliance alerts
- Litigation hold enforcement and secure large data set sharing via
- SimplyShare expedites e-Discovery
- Universal governance and enterprise information archiving of all business communications with one tool, enforcing one policy consistently across all media, including email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, RSS feeds, blogs, Slack, Workfront, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, and more
- Flexible enforcement of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) regulatory violations DLP incident remediation workflow
- Automatic and continuous updates of pre-configured DLP policies via in house lexicography experts
With UIA you can easily find data that requires removal, or for litigation purposes across all new media platforms. We have partnered with AppRiver to offer UIA with no import and export data costs. This solution features, a simple but powerful interface that helps you deploy quickly, reduces the burden on end-users, and integrates with your existing environment. It’s cloud-native and exhibits an unusually quick time-to-value.
- Fast provisioning and migration
- No-cost data migration
- Expert phenomenal care with migration support
Implementing an information archive gives you the tools to be prepared for unexpected requests, from open records requests to auditor queries or litigation holds. The archive indexes all data for quick searching. You can query terabytes of data in seconds, scanning for specific words or phrases, to produce the right data for auditors and you can securely share this data internally or externally without IT help. It’s so simple, teams can run their own preliminary searches, reducing eDiscovery costs.
Data that seems insignificant at first can sometimes become important during the course of an investigation or litigation. And regulation and public expectations on privacy are still evolving. Now you can classify and tag data both proactively—flagging data for future review—and retroactively, tagging messages during audits. That helps with early case assessments, regulatory reviews, and compliance with new rules:
- Supervision
- eDiscovery
- SimplyShare
- Legal holds
- Message classification
This technology is quickly becoming essential to any company that has compliance requirements. Very soon, that is going to be all companies. Currently 40% of the US population is covered under privacy laws, including all citizens of California.
Is your business prepared to defend themselves in case a privacy lawsuit is waged against you? If not, it is definitely time to take a serious look at some of the platforms that can help you easily become compliant like our current UIA offering. Contact us today to talk about what you need from briteCITY!