Compliance Stuff

Key Takeaways AI agents can harvest, synthesize, and exfiltrate trade secrets through more than a dozen evasion techniques that generate no conventional security alert. Employees can photograph AI-generated screen displays with personal devices, bypassing every layer of digital monitoring entirely. Companies must act now: update AI acceptable-use policies, mandate prompt logging, restrict personal devices in sensitive work areas, and build AI review into departure protocols. I. The Threat: A New and Undetectable Form of Trade Secret Theft Artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally changed the insider threat calculus for companies that rely on trade secrets. Traditional employee misappropriation – bulk file downloads, USB transfers, personal email exfiltration – leaves a recognizable forensic footprint. Data loss prevention (DLP) tools, endpoint detection agents, and network monitoring platforms were built to find exactly these patterns, and they have become reasonably effective at ...

Sheesh. Monday is  Social Media Day , and our wonderful Marketing team has asked me to do a blog post in honor of the occasion. In 2024, I had a list of tips about social media for employees and employers. It was pretty good, if I do say so myself, so  here’s a link  in case you missed it, or in case you just want to re-read and savor its awesomeness. For 2025, I have a social media cautionary tale for employers, and it is a doozy. THE CEO WHO COULDN'T SHUT UP A true story Chapter One: The plot thickens In 2022, a company’s Chief Technical Officer started making internal complaints about alleged sex discrimination and retaliation at his place of employment and advocating for some female executives who were allegedly not being treated equitably. I will assume  solely for the sake of argument  that this CTO’s internal complaints lacked merit and that he was a high-maintenance troublemaker and a pain in the neck. Right before Christmas 2022, the employer fired the ...

Employee theft of trade secrets is not only on the rise but is now easier than ever before due to widespread access to rapidly evolving and affordable technology.  Employees continue to use personal email accounts, thumb drives, phone cameras, personal cloud-based accounts (such as OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud), and external hard drives to mass-transfer, store, and retain their employer’s trade secret information post-separation. But are these types of technological advances the biggest threat to trade secret protection? With the rise in popularity and availability of generative artificial intelligence (“gen AI”), many employers fear that safeguarding their trade secret information in the future may become even more difficult. How employees are using gen AI in the workplace Employers may be surprised to hear that, according to one survey recently conducted by McKinsey & Company, 61 percent of workers are either using or plan to use Gen AI in conjunction with their work. ...