As of January 1^st 2013, California follows in the footsteps of Illinois and Michigan where the Social Media Privacy Act (CA SB 1349) officially takes effect. The new law prohibits employers or schools to ask for workers or applicant’s passwords to their Facebook, email, or other social media sites. With everyone’s ever-growing digital life, the importance of digital identity privacy is now being addressed.

But what happens when your users upload sensitive corporate documents into consumer services like Dropbox? This new law defines “social media” as “an electronic medium where users may create, share, and view user-generated content” – so even cloud services like Dropbox or other similar super-mega-let-you-sync-share-file-free sites may very well be included in the same category. With such a broad definition for what constitutes a social media site, this prevents a company from getting sensitive corporate files back if a user does upload them to a “social media site”. IT will have no recourse whatsoever as they are prohibited from requesting an individual user’s password to those sites.

Leverage your own AD with Oxygen

Companies do not own an individual user’s digital identity, therefore has no way of enforcing any policies to control access and permissions. But large organizations already have their own corporate identity systems established. Users usually use their corporate AD/LDAP credentials to access their work laptop, email and other applications. But in this multi-device world, traditional ways of file access isn’t enough. Users often do adopt tools such as Dropbox because they need mobile access to their work files or they want an easier way to share files with others without going through the hassle of a web portal or VPN.

Here is how Oxygen can help. We let you give your users an easy way to access and share files, but we also let you leverage your own infrastructure and identities so you maintain complete control over data access. Oxygen integrates and authenticates against your company’s private AD/LDAP systems without creating additional identity silos that are unmanageable. Centrally manage Oxygen the same way you already manage your identities, your storage and applications.

Oxygen gives your company a smarter way to control what’s yours in the cloud.

- Julia
@JuliaMak