MedZilla.com: Resumes Are Trade Secrets!
By Lisette Hilton
Marysville, WA - June 13, 2003-- Frank Heasley, PhD, president
and CEO of MedZilla, committed to optimizing the privacy of job
board users long years before “privacy on the Web” became
a publicized issue. MedZilla’s latest move, to declare resumes
as trade secrets, is yet another layer of protection, offering
job candidates more peace of mind and setting an industry trend
toward more secure data.
MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional
community that serves biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare
and science, now provides candidates who post their resumes on
the site an additional level of data protection.
“We were among the first to automatically assign every MedZilla
candidate an email address at MedZilla, so all contacts would
be initiated through the MedZilla mail server, which is configured
to block spam. Our Terms of Use policy is one of the strongest
in the industry. We also go to great lengths to monitor activity
on our Web site, to help ensure that candidates get exactly what
they came to us for: jobs,” Dr. Heasley says. “We are
now the first job board that I know of to designate resumes as
trade secrets, so that anyone who logs onto MedZilla is fully
aware that the information on the site must only be used for its
intended purpose. Any abuse of the data outside of our licensing
terms is prohibited and can be criminally prosecuted.”
Resumes and user IDs and passwords are trade secrets because
they fit that legal definition. They are confidential information,
given to employers, recruiters or job boards for specific uses,
and they are treated confidentially by the candidates themselves
and those to whom the resumes are given in trust, according to
Dr. Heasley.
MedZilla has incorporated legal terminology into its contract
to emphasize that misuse of trade secret information can lead
to federal investigation and criminal charges.
According to Michele Groutage, MedZilla’s director of marketing,
candidates posting on the site have said they are pleased with
MedZilla’s privacy policy and other initiatives. “We
receive notes of thanks on a daily basis for our tireless efforts
on behalf of candidates’ privacy,” Groutage says.
MedZilla’s recent action declaring trade secrets is a trend
among Web-based companies, legal experts say.
There is an emerging body of law that says that Web sites are
like chattel -- personal property over which owners exercise dominion.
So, when a Web site is invaded, or the access is inappropriate,
it’s the same as someone walking into your office and taking
something out of your desk.
New legal cases involve people relying on torts, including trespass
to chattel or electronic trespassing, to protect and block access
to Web sites. Another level of protection comes from federal and
state statutes that prohibit tampering with computers; these go
beyond protecting the information, to protecting the computer
system itself and the information that it contains. Those lawsuits,
experts say, frequently involve hostile spiders and robots, which
invade and steal information from systems.
Yet another law, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
makes it illegal to circumvent access controls. Finally, there
is the layer of protection that says the information, itself,
is a trade secret.
Dr. Heasley says, “As the Internet, and our understanding
of it, evolves, we are finding that there is a large body of well-developed
laws that already exist. Simply because something occurred in
cyberspace doesn’t mean that it isn’t subject to the
same ethical and legal standards that apply to all other environments.”
