Government Sector
The U. S. Department of Defense and the State Department are officially sanctioning the use of social media, including permitting the personal use of social networks on work computers.
In a Foreign Affairs Manual on Information Management, the Departments acknowledge the roles social networking play in conducting diplomatic, public affairs, intelligence-gathering and internal collaboration activities, and provide guidance in the document for the use of social media.
Social media is allowed on both classified and unclassified Department networks.
The Department manual has a section specifically addressing the personal use of social media on government networks. It also specifies that social content must be Section 508 compliant, highlights important records management compliance issues and requires separate social media "terms of use" be posted on official sites.
This is an excellent example of a comprehensive government social media policy. It incorporates many of the "best practices" that we have been encouraging our government clients to adopt in their policies. We wholehearted recommend you review it for how these apply to your agency.
[ Resources for you ]
Using Social Media: U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 5—Information Management
| Download U.S. Department of State Policy: Using Social Media (5 FAM 79)0 (PDF) |
News Update: Be Careful How You Archive Social Site Content
Last month, we gave you a "heads-up" that a case before the courts (Facebook v PowerVentures) might impact how you archive or aggregate content from Facebook and other social media sites to comply with records acts provisions.
The good news is a U.S. federal court ruled in this case that violating a website terms of use is not a crime. However, the court ruled that if a social site sets up technological barriers for scraping content - even if done simply to enforce terms of use - any service that bypasses them in order to scrape a users own content may violate California's computer crime laws.
If your agency is using a service, such as Power.com, to aggregate your data from several networks, be sure to ask if the service has an agreement with the networks to access and aggregate the data.
More importantly, find out if they use any technologies to circumvent any of the site's blocking mechanisms and if they have been asked to stop collecting the data. And, of course, don't code around barriers set up by any social site.
In an increasingly cloud-based world it is sometimes difficult to tell where your aggregation service is headquartered. It may be important to find out - even if they have offices in your country - to ensure they are aware if ab subject to the laws that impact you.
[ Resources for you ]
LawUpdates.com commentary: Facebook v. Power Ventures: Facebook Terms of Use Against Scraping
| Read article: Facebook v. Power Ventures: Facebook Terms of Use Against Scraping |
