Rise of Social Media Ads Creating New Trade Secrets Litigation Issues

The rapid rise of targeted advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites “is creating new issues to unpack in trade secrets litigation,” said Parker Poe partner David Pardue in a client alert. "Whomever you hire to handle social media marketing, you will want to make sure they are getting their data from places they are supposed to," he said. "To avoid getting caught up in costly litigation, ensure the data they are using is not somebody’s trade secret." Recent “lessons learned” could be of value to nonprofits, businesses and their customer relationship management (CRM) database vendors, he said. “First is being careful about what types of information you share with third-party vendors, including CRMs and social media marketing agencies.” The vendors themselves “should be aware of the risks they are inheriting when they take other organizations’ data,” he said. “Once that data is mixed in with yours, you are infected and could become part of a forensic cleaning process to retrieve that data.” It’s important to have “strong contractual protections” involving data security and trade secrets, he said. It’s “worth considering” signing nondisclosure agreements with third-party marketing companies “to make clear what information must be kept confidential,” he said. “The NDA should also have language requiring cooperation if data needs to be recouped later.”