Doug Cornelius on compliance for private equity real estate
I’m sure you heard that Facebook is paying a $5 billion fine for privacy violations to the Federal Trade Commission. You may not have heard that the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to pile on and fine Facebook another $100 million for disclosure failures. As Matt Levine of Bloomberg says “Everything is securities fraud.” [T]he … Read more »
There have been many stories written about the Goldman Sachs investment in Facebook. On one hand, there is the chatter about the investment placing the valuation at $50 billion. On the other, there hand there is the talk about how this affects a possible IPO by Facebook. There are two main reasons for an public … Read more »
Panda Security released its first annual Social Media Risk Index for small- and medium-sized businesses. They surveyed 315 US SMBs with up to 1,000 employees during the month of July. 33 percent of these companies had experienced a malware or virus infection from social networks 23 percent citing employee privacy violations resulting in the loss … Read more »
In the recent case of Crispin v. Audigier, a California judge ruled that Facebook and MySpace messages that aren’t publicly available are protected information under the Stored Communications Act, and therefore can’t be subpoenaed for use in civil litigation. Buckley Crispin sued clothing maker Christian Audigier for copyright infringement, alleging that Audigier used his artistic … Read more »
I was in the audience for FINRA’s latest educational Program: Implementing Compliance Practices for Social Media. This program addressed implementation of new guidance that FINRA recently issued in Regulatory Notice 10-06, concerning social media. Resources and Supplementary Material (.pdf) Slide deck (.pdf) These are my notes, live from the program (& riddled with typos): Introduction … Read more »
Here are some interesting stories from the past week. Tis the Season! Where are the gifts from vendors?? from Kathleen Edmond, Best Buy’s Chief Ethics Officer This time every year we send out reminders to our employees that we do not accept gifts from vendors. At the same time we send letters to our vendors … Read more »
I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. Clara Shih,founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, which develops web applications to track brand engagement and accelerate sales on Facebook and Twitter. She is also the author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, … Read more »
Fulbright & Jaworski, the international law firm, just published their 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report. It is an independent survey of senior corporate counsel from a wide range of industry sectors. About half of the respondents (52% of U.K. and 46% of U.S.) claim to block employees from accessing social networking Web sites. Two … Read more »
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The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association conducted a survey among compliance and ethics professionals in late August 2009 to see what employers are doing about the use of these sites by their employees. They got back almost 800 responses from their members using an online survey tool. 50% … Read more »