Sharing Confidential information - Navigating the gray
Transcript
high sku council for CTO of Iser calm hopefully with a quick coffee chat we don't know how these things pan out at that we edit them but we're going to talk about information handling and when it's okay to share confidential information so this is one of those areas where you know what I might have given everyone a little bit too much credit because I've spent a lot of my career highly regulated industries from banking to government and now health care I've gotten an awful lot of
training on confidential information in handling confidential information that includes confidential information generated by my customers by our internal organization and even by competitors so let's start out by saying the first thing you should always do when performing the asset test on whether or not you can share confidential information is to say do you have the written permission to do so if you have written permission to share something marked as confidential that it's okay to share it now outside of that we're talking about navigating the grade
I think in the technology community especially if you blog there's a lot of gray area a lot of times as bloggers will receive materials that's marked confidential so is it okay to share that in a blog post I like to you know what tread on a the safe side they still get written permission and I prefer that the person that sent me the information take off the confidential marker so that my readers if they wanted to reshare it they have permission to do so and there
is no uncertainty in journalism is generally accepted that if the public good is served in other words the public has a right to the information and even if it's marked confidential journalistic organizations can share that in that data most journalistic organizations have a big law department they can run and stuff through if you don't have a law department to run this stuff through tread very very carefully when it comes to sharing confidential information now let's talk about from a competitive landscape if you receive a competitor's
confidential information this is just me giving you some practical advice go to your internal lawyer your internet law department and make sure that it's okay with your internal policy that you even have the data doesn't matter if you received it directly from a competitor if you receive it through a third party if you downloaded it from a website and a lot of industries you can get your organization in some serious trouble if you even possess confidential information this is especially the case around pricing you can
get into some serious issues when it comes to price fixing if you already have a cut a competitor's pricing information now why would a customer care if a vendor shares another vengers confidential information again I come from a highly regulated background so whether it's government banking health care we're very sensitive around the topic information marked is confidential even if it's from a competitor basically it's a acid test of your ability to handle confidential information if you receive confidential information and you don't treat it as such
you don't treat it with the weight vet that marker deserves then as a customer I'm going to naturally question whether or not your organization has the policies in place to question or to control confidential information so hopefully this has been a conversation that's not needed for most of us we've already stopped the video and said Keith I know all of this and for those who have made it to the end follow me on Twitter at CTU advisor on the web the CTO advisor calm talk to
you guys next coffee chat
