Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.)
That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer that I arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.”
That wasn’t a particularly satisfying answer for me personally. I had one of the original 5,000 LinkedIn accounts while it was still in beta, and I have only a small number of contacts because I make it a point to limit my contacts to people I know personally — people I’ve worked with (or for), people I know from face-to-face interactions.
The idea that an employer might someday claim that my contacts belonged to them was more than a little unsettling. Now, a court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that none of them became clients of his new firm.
That clarifies one legal issue in the U.K. at least: the contacts on your LinkedIn profile are more likely to belong to your employer than they are to you if those contacts are customers, employees, or vendors you did business with in your job.
According to press reports, this is the first time a British court has ordered an employee to turn over all LinkedIn contacts to an employer.
It “highlights the tension between businesses encouraging employees to use social networking websites for work but then claiming that the contacts remain confidential information at the end of their employment,” according to the Telegraph newspaper. More
