Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me? You spend months or years building up a client list for your employer. You nurture the relationship and build up personal ties with the client. When you leave the employer, naturally the client goes with you. And so does the client list, via a USB stick or Dropbox or your webmail account. If you don’t get all the details before …
I was wondering what this thread was all about. I couldn't see the cartoon on the mobile site. Now I'm at my computer at work, I can slack off AND see the illustrations.
What you call "suspenders" we call "garters" in the US. Your braces are our suspenders. I have no idea what "garters" are to you, so I don't know what word we use for it.
Sometimes I think our forebears changed some word usage and certain symbols just to be spiteful. We WERE a bit ticked off at you back in the late 1700s.
I expect the cartoon was drawn by an American artist. Sometimes American culture manages to get out and pollute your information stream. It's worse than a cholera outbreak!
According to God's own dictionary, a garter is "a band warn around the leg to keep up a stocking or sock. ■ N. Amer. A suspender for a sock or stocking." While a suspender is defined as, "Brit. an elastic strap attached to a belt or garter, fastened to the top of a stocking to hold it up. 2. (suspenders) N. Amer. a pair of braces for holding up trousers."
That's almost as transparent as 200 denier black stockings. But I think we have garters and suspender belts. But you uncivilised rogues don't know what a garter is and call suspender belts garters. I may be wrong as I wear, um, tights...
"Sometimes I think our forebears changed some word usage and certain symbols just to be spiteful. We WERE a bit ticked off at you back in the late 1700s."
In some cases it is us Brits that have changed the words, and the American usage is closer to Elizabethan English.
Bill Bryson wrote a very good book about it all called "Mother Tongue".
"Sometimes I think our forebears changed some word usage and certain symbols just to be spiteful."
While, as others have observed, the American usage often reflects older versions of English (i.e. where the English themselves changed their use of the language post-1700s), it *is* also the case that the Americans deliberately changed things round for the sake of differentiating themselves.
Specifically, Noah Webster. 'Nuff said.
no it is no more murky, if you create the data on a third-party system as part of you employment then the company and you are responsible under DPA.
now if you are just linking to information that is supplied be a 3rd party (the personal details your contact loads onto LinkedIn) then you are fine as far as DPA goes specific contracts may limit what you can do with that but it is not a regulator thing.
hope that is accurate
LinkedIn presumes all of your contacts to be personal and part of your "personal business network".
So storing them in the first place is something for the employer to worry about. It walks as a DPA violation, it quacks as a DPA violation, it is probably a DPA violation.
Once stored, however, they are not company property - they are your personal property so the company cannot force you to erase them or unlearn them. It can however using standard non-compete and non-solicitation clauses force the issue for you not to be able to use any of them.
Unless there is a different LinkedIn to the one that Microsoft has just taken over then you don't store contact details of others on LinkedIn. The other party creates all their own contact details and information.
As this is a data protection issue then and interrelated contact information is not covered by the DPA. Therefore you are down to a civil case over whether your contract in some way requires you to delete all contacts that you have made via linkedIn during your employment -I would argue impossible to enforce.
So really it would just come down to whether you are disallowed by contract to 'poach' a customer and introduce them to your new company, but this would be generic and unrelated to LinkedIn.
IANAL
I think you'll find anything on LinkedIn belongs to LinkedIn. Whether that's a problem for you, your old employer or your new one, I wouldn't like to say, but if you consider contacts lists as company assets then I'd have thought storing them on a social media / data mining site is a little odd.
Once stored, however, they are not company property - they are your personal property so the company cannot force you to erase them or unlearn them. It can however using standard non-compete and non-solicitation clauses force the issue for you not to be able to use any of them.
See, this is the bit where it seems to be a bit grey. If you're hired from Company A to Competitor B, then even if you hand all your stuff in and don't take stuff with you, you still know your customers. When you pitch for them to switch to your new employer, that relationship still exists, you know what they paid last time and you likely have a fair idea what they're being quoted by your previous employer. It's basically insider knowledge, but short of moving to an entirely new industry, it's broadly impossible to not use your experience to your advantage. You can not take that a physical list of contacts, but if it's all up in your head then where are you going to start when you start compiling a pitch-list of prospective clients?
Obviously taking lists of sales, confidential pricing data, etc is all way out of line, but if you've memorised all that stuff, you're going to use it. It's called experience, and it's what you've been hired for!
Yes, more murky and will depend upon the use made. Some cases have said that it's the employee's personal account and this sits well with the LI terms. Conversely, an employee who has run the employer's LI group page, or who has uploaded contacts or who has used LI as their contacts database may have to turn it over to the employer.
I think that its a bit ingenious on the part of the author.
In the article he stated:
-=-
These obligations also apply to the outgoing employee. In May 2016, the Information Commissioner’s Office successfully prosecuted Mark Lloyd (his real name), an ex-employee of Acorn Waste Management Ltd in Shropshire, for emailing the details of 957 clients to his personal email address along with purchase history and commercially sensitive information prior to taking a role with a rival. In that particular case, the individual in question pleaded guilty and was fined £300, ordered to pay £405.98 costs and a £30 victim surcharge.
-=-
[emphasis added]
Here's the sticky issue. You (Mark Lloyd) have formed a business relationship with the clients.
Taking the names of the clients and their contact information (e.g. phone/email) in itself isn't going to be an issue because the relationship could extend beyond work. This has more to do with what he does with the information.
If Mark attempts to sell the information... he's in hot water. If he passes it on to a new work colleague... he's in hot water. If he sends out a farewell email announcing he's leaving/left the company and provides his contact information... he would not be in any hot water.
What really hurt Mark is that he didn't just take the contact info, but the sales information which is company specific and not in any shape or form personal.
Connecting with clients on LinkedIn, aka your third party, in itself isn't an issue or anything for an employer to fret about, nor something that they could do anything legally about.
If you are making contacts as a result of being employed by a company, all the client data you collect is owned by the company. Yes, each is your hard work and a personal relationship, but that's how I feel about the systems I set up for my employers (I love my little systems). When I leave, they stay here.
People know they are Doing Wrong. It's why they try to hide it by deleting texts and so forth.
I don't doubt that in many cases what you say is true.
However, if one was to believe the well-known quotation: "Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.", then replace "me" by the employer in question, you might also consider that such "delete" actions might just show an element of caution.
It is confusing... If I get handed a business card by a supplier or customer, who owns the card at that point? If, say, Customer B and I find mutual interests outside of business...we remain friends even though one or both of us have moved on, who owns "us"?
This is murkier than I thought.
"She also emailed a small amount of this information to her friend, Mr Murphy (not his real name either) who worked with a third party in HR, to assist with her appeal."
Someone in HR assisting with her appeal against her employer??
"Shortly after she submitted her appeal, Mrs Smith’s employer became aware of her actions ..."
What a surprise!
...and the 80s were pretty much peak Filofax, and well into the 90s. Plenty of places that weren't IT-related businesses were using paper diaries, address books and so on into the 00s (and there are still dinosaurs where I work who insist on ordering a bound diary each year).
Copy the important information using the old method of pen and paper - no audit trail to incriminate you.
(If you are planning to leave then memorise the details of 2 or 3 clients each day and write them down after you have left the building. For most businesses the top 10 to 20 clients are the important ones and this amount of information can be extracted using human memory. This is usually legal (as well as untraceable) as using information that you remember is normally not prohibited.)
Copy the important information using the old method of pen and paper - no audit trail to incriminate you.
(If you are planning to leave then memorise the details of 2 or 3 clients each day and write them down after you have left the building. For most businesses the top 10 to 20 clients are the important ones and this amount of information can be extracted using human memory. This is usually legal (as well as untraceable) as using information that you remember is normally not prohibited.)
It depends a bit on the contract of employment you have, I guess (IANAL). Most of these contain some form of timeout period in which you are not supposed to initiate contact with former clients (large hole: if they contact you, it's not your fault but you best ensure you can prove that) - quite common with sales people and contracts in the financial sector.
"With half decent IT external device being used / copied to should be logged (assuming external device use actually allowed in first place on the machine)"
Everyone walks round with a camera in their pocket now. Just take photographs of the information on the screen with your personal phone.
"...do it on your cow-orkers PC when they wander off for a coffee and leave their terminal unlocked."
Surely that is when you screenshot their desktop and icons, rotate it in paint by 180 degrees and set it as their new background while hiding all their actual icons. Doesn't leave much time for anything else.
Archive to memory stick, put in pocket before you leave.
It surprises me how many people only start to think seriously about their exit after they have resigned or been given notice. One of the few certainties is that you will change employers, most probably several times over your career and not all of them will necessarily be expected and/or planned so it is worth being prepared...
Taking Data with you (code or customers) with the explicit purpose of using it in a direct competitor as your next employer is just plain dumb, Plus if your new employer accepts that practice, how might they treat you? and why should they trust you not to pull the same stunt with them?
Keeping a copy of the code you've worked on, as a personal reference maybe dubious, but the next employer is hiring you for your experience. I would never copy and paste previous code or re-implement a proprietary algorithm. (e.g. Forex trades ). but in the same way as you can get coding solutions from t'interweb sometimes a previous design may be re-usable without detriment to a previous employer\client.
A previous (contract) employer probably regrets I did not take a code copy
A long time after my contract there they contacted me to quote for adding some extra functionality to some software I had created when I worked there.
The work sounded easy enough & a chunk of for a bit of coding I could squeeze in easily enough seemed OK, so I dropped by their offices a few days later, checked they were OK to give me out of hours access to do my stuff & asked them to sort me out a machine with development environment, code etc. - just stuff I needed, no access to anything I did not require for the task.
A few days later I got an update ...it transpired someone (they never said who - so guessing v. senior) had deleted all the code base, only keeping the executable / dlls required. None of their rolling backups went far back enough to have a copy of the code.
"Surely I had an old copy at home I could dig out" they said ... I had to gently explain that I had no copies of anything from my time there as to do so would have broken a huge number of laws relating to my employment.
Needless to say the easy money fell through as they would have had to sort out tools to do dis-assembly / decompile from exes / dlls & then it would depend on how "readable" code was as to how painful what should have been an easy coding task would be, so I declined & suggested someone in house do it as my charges would be a lot higher given the change of task difficulty.
A salutary lesson in only deleting if you are 100% sure something is not needed & that employer having sole ownership of your work does mean there is little an ex employee can do to help
AC obv
My (ex)employer has a habit of locking and/or deleting employee's accounts when the leave. If you're lucky they'll grudgingly give access to their personal drive to a line manager so that some files can be recovered. This has caused significant inconvenience to all over the years as people have left so I leave the code on a public (accessible to the group) directory and left my password lying around "just in case".
Its just that management doesn't think, with few exceptions they neither understand nor listen. So I try to keep all my 'personal' stuff open -- there really isn't anything confidential at work so you'd be dumb to keep anything that's compromising there. (You just need to control write access to prevent accidents.) The only real issue I have is with things like the GPL. The 'we own everything' management mindset tends to extend to things like the Linux kernel -- the "we modified a driver so its obviously company property" sort of thing. Trying to explain to management (sigh!) what can and what can not be kept confidential is tedious....timewasting....an exercise in masochism.....
Leaving your password around is a security issue. Everything done with it may make you liable.
I had several time issues with employees refusing to understand whatever they do on a company system is a company property. Some of them tried to format and wipe drives (unluckily programmers often need high privileges), up to a point they needed to be cut out from the systems before they could do any damage (usually these are also the ones who "forget" to check-in and store properly everything needed). And still some whined we were trying to "inspect their machines" while we only wanted to ensure nothing needed was lost because they forget to put it in the right place (there has been projects outside my reach so badly managed packages could be built only on a specific dev system).
While I could have understood it twenty years ago when people didn't have internet at home, no smartphones, tablets, etc., what the hell now you keep on a company system you have to attempt to wipe it when leaving?
But probably the two things are correlated, the worst employee are also the one who need most to wipe their disks...
The only real issue I have is with things like the GPL. The 'we own everything' management mindset tends to extend to things like the Linux kernel -- the "we modified a driver so its obviously company property" sort of thing.
If your company modifies a GPL driver, then they do in fact own the modifications. They don't even have to share the modifications with anyone or push it upstream*, provided that the driver is not distributed in binary form.
* But they should, it gets the modifications checked by a wider audience, and stops the new functionality bitrotting in a private repo when the driver is updated upstream, plus it's good to not be a dick
Guess it's quite useful to stress the trouble you can hit if you're "naive". I have a sysadmin colleague, which has been often asked lately to export email accounts of people moving from our subsidiary to others inside the same parent company (separate mail systems, they were re-imported in the new ones). Once I caught him doing that instead for an executive actually *leaving* the company. He was so stupid he didn't understand he was helping committing a crime, and could have been liable. He has been working for a so long time for that executive, and they were in friendly terms, thus he wasn't able to separate his duties as a company sysadmin from his friendship, and understand the damage he could have caused to the company he still works for, and to himself.
Ethics and common sense are less common than many believe. While lack of laws knowledge is more common than believed.
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