Who owns your profile – two recent cases on social networking sites

Two recent cases have given guidance on who has the rights to a profile on social networking sites.

In Hays Specialist Recruitment (Holdings) Limited and Another v Ions and Another the court held that Hays had “reasonable grounds for considering that” Mr. Ions had used LinkedIn, a social networking site specifically aimed at linking business contacts, to copy and retain confidential information belonging to Hays.

Hays alleged that Mr. Ions had, whilst still an employee of Hays, copied and then retained confidential information concerning clients and contacts of Hays. They then say he used that information in his subsequent business thereby breaching the restrictive covenant in his contract of employment. Hays was granted an order for the pre-action disclosure of documents which evidenced the uploading of business contacts and evidenced dealing with those contacts after Mr. Ions had left employment.

Mr. Ions contended that Hays knew he had uploaded contact details onto LinkedIn and, indeed, was encouraged to use the site to gain potential business. He claimed that once these contacts were loaded and the LinkedIn invitation accepted the information was no longer confidential.

Whilst the Judge was not asked to rule on this particular issue he did say that “even if [Mr. Ions] uploaded [the contacts] with authority, it is difficult to imagine that the authority was not limited to using them in the performance of his duties as an employee of Hays”.

This case would lead to the conclusion that your LinkedIn profile if used in the course of your employment might not belong to you but to your employer. If this is the case then as Talent Technology Blog point out what do you do when you move employer? Do you have to delete all recommendations from ex-clients? Do you have to remove all work contacts?  What happens if those contacts are also personal contacts? Watch this space and maybe we will have an answer.

On a slightly related note it would appear that the situation on Facebook may be different. In the recent case of Firsht v Readman, Mr. Firsht successfully sued for defamation and libel. Mr. Firsht discovered that a false profile of him had been generated on Facebook and that it contained private information about him purporting to include details of his sexual orientation and preferences and his political and religious beliefs.

The court found that the IP address used to set up the profile belonged to the home computer of a Mr. Grant Raphael, who was an ex-friend of Mr. Firsht. The court then went on to find that the material uploaded was defamatory and libelous.

Even though the profile was removed by Facebook within 16 days of it first appearing, Mr. Firsht was awarded £22,000 in damages including aggravated damages.

Mr. Firsht was able to obtain a successful prosecution due to the fact that Mr. Readman had used his own computer; if Mr. Readman had used a computer in an internet café the situation may have been very difficult.