It was super not personal, it was just a situation were second chances were not given, period. Thats a horrendously burdensome thing to ask! +1000. But if youre singling people out, or only using it in the context of chastising someone, then yeah, for sure condescending and rude. In my experience, it was highly effective. This is essential to sanction the employee and also send out a clear . Employees who violate their companies' email policies can face penalties ranging from disciplinary action to termination. It's difficult to prevent a leak from happening again if you don't know how it occurred in the first place. I had not thought about this issue via this lens, but I think youre 100% right. Then b) she felt so guilty she admitted it to a coworker. If someone preempts that, theyre not happy about it generally. Concepts like snitching, tattling, and ratting out dont apply in the workplace. Right? After all, nobody wants to tell their manager that they might (however accidentally) be responsible for a data breach. 1964 is what I remember. I work in the auto industry in media communications. And then there are things you cannot even hint at under any circumstances. Or at least, feeling like one should have been possible. I just wasn't thinking at the moment I sent the information. See Rule 1.2 (d). But leadership has to know that if they share confidential material with us that it will stay confidential. |. Same here! I think people beat themselves up enough internally without us having to do it for them most of the time. If you lie during the interview and the truth later comes out, thats enough to get you fired. Agreed. If that puts it in perspective. . This is an actual security headache/nightmare for my government department as its so common for people to go out to lunch and start discussing what theyre working on while eating. Ive only had a very general idea of what my husband does since 2002, because he cant tell me. Practice talking about it until you can truly pull it off. OP erred, which she knows, but I dont think that means her mentor no longer has the obligation to be honest with her. I dont know. Maybe the information was a big deal to the agency but not externally (say getting a big grant funded), but if it was something that was legitimately important news, her friend would have been at least a little torn between loyalty to her friend and loyalty to her job. Thats why they told you the information was confidential. OP, you truly buried the lede: you leaked to a journalist. These policies are sometimes written down in employee handbooks. Everyone makes mistakes at all points in our careers. Alison, I really liked your advice, because it can apply to any situation where the person has truly done something egregious but has to move on. Or the surrounding land if its something that will raise property values. For many fed and state agencies, non-public records _must_ be released on a records request despite their non-public status unless they fit into a narrow set of explicit exemptions. Trying to tell the OP otherwise is to minimize the impact of a serious offense. This just wasnt the place for you in the end. I meant inadvertently as they were confiding in a friend not willfully giving information to the press. Im not understanding how OPs update comment reads as defensiveit shows significant progression from deflection to ownership, to me. My boss wanted to press charges, but his business partner didnt, so they just fired him. And the young comment. Then both OP and Coworker could be out of a job. Some offenses are so serious that you immediately get fired. Maybe you get a 2nd chance IF you were contrite enough and blamed your excitement at the new teapot program. Because I said I wouldnt, I knew there would be consequences if something like your story happened to me, and also because, hows that going to look to a potential future employer that might value confidentiality equally highly? Recurring theme here is that tattling isnt a thing at work. Heres another the state Supreme Court will probably make a decision on voting district gerrymandering soon., (This one happened to me, and was probably the most exciting confidential information I got access to my desk was close enough to the GIS employees that I could see the increased traffic out of their area and infer that Something was Happening. I say dont lie during any part of the job application. Of course, if this happens regularly there is more chance of human error being made so it's always best to use a mailing program. If theyd covered up for her/not removed her access to confidential info and she did it again, their jobs would be on the line too the next time. OP, please do not take this comment string seriously, because internalizing these statements will severely harm your ability to address your error effectively. I minored in journalism and this attitude is why I never worked in the industry. This is awkward to frame as apparently it would have passed unnoticed if you hadnt taken aim at your own foot and then pulled the triggerit would be better if you were fired after fessing up to your superiors, rather than involving anyone else. In other words, dont assume the information only went to the person you sent it to. But I dont think it helps OP to feed a narrative that prevents OP from owning the situation going forward. I was working on some client confidential information on my client issued laptop and I emailed this info to my personal mailbox as I wanted to continue doing work on my personal laptop; I couldn't take my work laptop away whilst on extended leave overseas. Theres a great blog called SorryWatch (.com) that analyzes & critiques apologies made by public figures. exciting! They have absolutely no obligation to keep secrets for government agencies or private companies. still cant believe that happened. LW best of luck! Was this alone enough to be fired, or is there a history? When I finally came clean about it an interview, the response from the hiring manager was thats ridiculous, I would never fire anyone for that.. What happened is reputation-ruining for such jobs so re-assessing what is realistic in terms of job expectations after this is important to moving on successfully Resist the temptation to gossip about fellow employees and don't express your disdain for your. Rules are there because its so easy to do that thing that feels harmless, and sometimes nobody gets hurt.. Point is that the higher-level feelings or lowest level conceptualization (that is, the integration of the gut punch and the sense that it cant have been that bad, if it wasnt meant badly, and sense that it cant have been wrong to trust friend, because friend was trustworthy) are still encouraging OP to draw incorrect conclusions about the seriousness of their action, and the appropriateness of their employers actions. She shared it via text not voice, but text, which could be seen by someone else. In sending that information to your own mailbox, you transmitted the data to a number of machines, any number of which could be intercepting the data for reading, and many do albeit for legit purposes of scanning for advertising relevant stuff or scanning viruses. For excellent reasons. The z department is not allocating the staff they promised. Policy change that is a big deal to staff that works on it, but very in the weeds for the general public (regulation is going to be changed in a way that is technically important but at most a medium-sized deal), Fairly real examples that would be much bigger deals: Thats not how embargoes work, and the reasons why we have embargoes are important and valid, even if they may seem like not a big deal in the context of a specific disclosure. I know there are cases where someone might fear retaliation etc, but with a higher up getting a subordinate into (deserved sorry OP!) The issue of whether HIPAA information can be emailed is complicated. Our actions and our thoughts can definitely be wrong, but calling someones feelingswhich they have little to no control overwrong (or, dead wrong with double asterisks), only contributes to shame and self-loathing. They are not neutral. Or maybe one of those people isnt quite as trustworthy as the person who told them thought they were, and they tell the wrong person, or tell multiple people, or write an article about it because theyre also a journalist. This is a GREAT way to position it. There are lots of situations in which leaking information to a journalist would absolutely be the right thing to do, and we should absolutely encourage it in those cases. We see people destroy themselves with guilt, and so we try to tell people theres no need to feel guilty or ashamed. I get so exasperated with TV shows where a SO throws a tantrum about a cop/government worker not being able to tell them stuff, and turns it into a trust issue. Those who work in circumstances that require them learn how to filter through multiple layers of risk when they get to a point where they come up against that need to share. Sometimes its because someone could obtain an unfair benefit from early access to what will later become public information (e.g., think analogous to insider trading). And that wasnt even technically confidential. I fully expect that whenever they find the source of the leak the people involved will face some pretty serious consequences up to and including dismissal and possible criminal proceedings. All this said, I think Alisons approach is the best one when youre applying for jobs. He and my mother kept their noses clean. Unfortunately these days a lot of the regulators are crooked and will never do anything about problems without a lot of public pressure (and sometimes not even then). The communications person from the Marine Band was immediately fired when it was discovered she had leaked this information. You made a mistake. Examples that most journalists would find pretty snoozy (although journalists who cover the agency super-closely for trade publications, Politico Pro, Bloomberg Gov, etc, would still be interested): Im now turning my head sideways and re-reading/rethinking. The thing is, its a big deal that you were given confidential information and then texted it to a friend. Its not their call. I replaced someone who had embezzled from the (small) company. I got defensive and young from OPs response. Dont fall for it. Ive had the occasional day when Ive really wanted to tell someone I met X today! A little time isn't unreasonable. Also in any governmental job or any job governed by many laws and regulations (such as medicine, law, dentistry, etc) they are laws and compliance regulations in place that must be abided by and every employee had to sign such an agreement usually yearly but at least upon hiring. I work in communications for a large organization and I see this as a trust issue with leadership. This is why you never ever confidentially share work-related things with colleagues. You knew better. Its going to bite someoneand this time the person it bit was herself, which gives her a good opportunity to work on discipline and discretion. It could also end poorly if the employer actually sees a job opening posted for the position the LW claims was eliminated. I know Id be pissed at you. If there were excetions, that would be explicitly stated. Its a great professional resource with a lot of professional development around ethics. So for instance when I got an emergency grant from a water supplier for a woman with no income, there wasnt any risk that telling my wife would identify the woman. One of the things your field requires is to be able to think and act dispassionately about the information you have custody over. It made it seem like some part of OP still feels hard done by, rather than really getting it. It doesnt matter if your friend is a journalist or not; thats a total red herring. Ramp up your privacy settings across all accounts. Of course, but if you think that there arent tons of people out there whove made huge mistakes and managed to keep it from getting out, youre kidding yourself. If something like this would help, maybe try it. For the purposes of VIWI, a confidential client shall be able to establish a mutually authenticated TLS channel with the auth server and resource service, providing a trusted identity, usually in the form of a certificate signed by . I did not get fired for the offense, but I genuinely learned a great deal from the experience and it changed the entire way I interacted with clients, for the better. All people, of all ages, are capable of errors in judgment. Feelings are frequently conflated with facts in our minds and it can take some work to separate them. Even when it doesnt require them to report it, it still could have consequences they dont want to be a part of! It doesnt matter that the information is going public next week. Journalists seek out and report information thats their job.. I recently saw a movie in pre-screening thats being pushed to be a blockbuster. And calling this victimless isnt a helpful framing; if you do something thats clearly forbidden and could result in real harm, thats a problem even if no harm resulted this time. Accept responsibility for what you did. Plus, I think part of it was that it was exciting BECAUSE it was secret, and now its apparently common knowledge. Of course. Heck, at my agency were cautioned to not use work email on our personal devices (unless were management or its an emergency) because records requests could potentially get our personal devices as well. Later when I moved on, it became my absolute best interview topic when asked about a mistake and how I handled it. And it could be part of the reason why the story was a bit incoherent, too she went from sort of uncomfortable to really, really uncomfortable. Ideally. (Obviously it would have been best not to give her journalist friend the info to begin with.) Oh, I wish Id seen this before replying. My late dad worked for a government defence research agency for most of his career. Assuming this is in the US, and were talking about FOIA laws, typically a records request will come through a particular channel (not likely to be some random employee in communications.). Fortunately, I was not fired for the mistake, but my employer did call me on the carpet for a very serious discussion on why we cant share any information that we only have access to because we work there, regardless of how sensitive or not sensitive we think it is on a case-by-case basis. If the email involves sensitive information, this could be a serious problem for the people involved. For the other 2 questions, I would simply urge you to remove the phrase ratted out from your professional vocabulary. I deal with it by having friends in the firm who I can say it to (but not in a bar!). The first job will be the hardest but gradually you are less and less likely to be asked about an older job. In my first job out of college in the insurance industry I reinstated someones coverage without verifying that they had had no claims in the lapsed period they immediately called claims and filed a $40,000 claim. Maybe OPs workplace does the same? Its like pain (heck, it IS pain); its telling you something important. trouble, it doesnt seem applicable. That all strikes me as stuff someone quite young and without strong professional and personal boundaries acts. I wouldnt be surprised if there was a state or federal regulation that she violated by sharing that information. I dont / cant post it publicly, but I can share all kinds of stuff with people close to me even friends in journalism, though I always specify off the record before i dish and my employer doesnt care because the concerns about confidentiality arent strict NDA / security issues. I completely agree that in the long run, this was a kindness. Eh, if a waitress at a homey diner calls everyone honey, I wouldnt call it condescending. The company I work for uses keyloggers and text scanners on our computers to catch these kinds of issues. If you dont need to / want to share with the boss share with your closest family/friend, assuming they dont work at the same place or have friends/contacts there. Ah! And I think you can share your excitement with others, just not the information. It shouldnt happen but Id understand if it did. Im more curious about what KIND of exciting information it was.
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