Workshare Press Releases

WHOLE FOODS COMPETITIVE STRATEGY INADVERTANTLY REVEALED IN FTC PDF DOCUMENT; DEMONSTRATES INADEQUATE DOCUMENT CONTENT CONTROL FOR CONFIDENTIAL TRADE SECRETS

Workshare Offers Strategies to Avoid Risk Associated With Sharing Documents

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.; August 15, 2007

On August 15, 2007, Associated Press reported on a story detailing how confidential competitive strategies designed by Whole Foods to take market share from low-cost leader Wal-Mart were revealed in a PDF document the Federal Trade Commission’s legal organization filed with the court electronically. In the document, words intended to be inaccessible were just electronically shaded black — a common mistake when using many commercially available PDF converters. The suppressed words in versions downloaded from court computer servers can be copied and pasted into Notepad or Microsoft Word and then read.

“Once more, the myth perpetuated by Adobe that PDF is a ‘secure’ format has come back to bite users,” said Joe Fantuzzi, CEO of Workshare. “PDFs are not leak proof in and of themselves. Like any other file type, they must be secured through the deployment of affordable and available technology that stops costly information leaks like this one.”

Workshare advises the media that losing control of critical confidential information is a growing problem that is both embarrassing and poses significant competitive risk for corporations that are bound to share documents. Corporations are required to send information to federal and state organizations, and they often choose to share information with valued customers and partners to gain competitive advantage. The risk of a third party seeing only what was intended to be viewed by the designated recipients is significant — and a problem that has yet to completely resolved in most global organizations.

Workshare makes the following recommendations to support greater data content control:

For more information about the Whole Foods/FTC story and other content control matters, please visit www.workshare.com. Joe Fantuzzi, CEO of Workshare, is available for immediate comment to members of the media; you can contact him through Trainer Communications at: ws@trainercomm.com.

About Workshare
Workshare, an information security company delivers secure content compliance solutions to over 6,000 organizations worldwide, including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 1000 and 85 percent of the ProServices 250. Workshare solutions uniquely combine policy enforcement, management control, and user entitlement to ensure safe information exchange without business disruption. The company’s products include Workshare Protect, Workshare Professional, Compare Service, and TRACE! Workshare’s customer base spans small to large organizations in every industry segment, and over one million professionals in 65 countries use Workshare software. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington DC, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Hong Kong, and Sydney. Workshare is the sponsor of www.metadatarisk.org, the definitive source for content security. For more information, visit www.workshare.com.