Ride the Lightning

Employees Stealing Your Data – Still an Epidemic

November 5, 2013

I am a big fan of my friend Molly DiBianca's Delaware Employment Law Blog. She often deals with topics that go beyond employment law and she is a perceptive observer of developments on the social media front. She recently had an excellent post discussing the results of an employee theft survey as described by the Wall St. Journal.

As Molly says, here are some of the most disturbing (though not surprising) findings from the survey:

• 50 percent of employees kept confidential information post-separation;
• 40 percent plan to use confidential information in their future employment; and
• 60 percent say a co-worker has offered documents from a former employer

Additionally,

• 52 percent of employees don’t believe that it’s a crime to use a competitor’s confidential business information; and
• 68 percent of employees say their organization doesn’t take preventative measures to ensure employees don’t use competitive information

You can combat the epidemic by:

• Training employees about the law;
• Having good policies in place;
• Making departing employees sign a statement upon departure that all company data has been returned and acknowledging that taking data is a crime;
• Using technology to track what is going on – for instance, having software in place that will send an alert when a large number of files are "touched."

The rampant immorality amongst departing employees leaves employers with little choice but to assume the worst and to take precautions to guard against data theft. Depressing, but true.

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