can you get fired for accidentally sending confidential information

All mom did was hand dad the phone. I am replying under Engineer Girl for a reason. So Id do what Alison says here, and save your OMG I cant keep this in confessions for your pets. You were wrapped up in a project and yes you messed up but no you didn't mean to. Dang! It goes through a game of telephone and the person at the end of the line gets mad that the first person would say such a thing. We see people destroy themselves with guilt, and so we try to tell people theres no need to feel guilty or ashamed. He shared it with one person, telling them it was a joke. Then the stories died down and the pressure with it even though there were still occasional leaks. I agree. I had not thought about this issue via this lens, but I think youre 100% right. Many employers monitor emails, and some employees . Fired. (Also the NASA leaker didnt get fired. (I thought Al Frankens apology to the fellow entertainer was pretty good, actually. [duplicate]. Im sorry this happened to you, OP, Im sure it feels devastating, and it sounds like some of the details were inflated but there is a good reminder here for all of us as some things cant be undone. I didnt read it that way, its not a question of the coworker being Untrustworthy, its a matter of the OP not being able to judge who she can trust to keep things quiet. What!!! would be frustrating if she had a good relationship with them, or if she cared a lot about the reputation of her publication as a whole. So- bad judgement buddies? And that doesnt even take into account that I could be prosecuted for divulging any private information. If OP reasoned I told mentor, confident that there was NO WAY she would let anything slip it throws a lot of doubt on her parallel reasoning of how certain it was that the journalist wouldnt let anything slip. When we accidentally receive a confidential email from people outside our own organisations, things are a little trickier. You're fired for violation but convince the Dept of Labor that no one without an IT degree could ever understand your policy. Ah! This is one of those very serious offenses for which there are no second chances in many organizations, even when the breach is accidental or through slop practices and not intentional. I dont know the full text of the conversation and I dont want to, but she was probably in a position where she had to tell someone. was. This is not about a public records requestits about how information is released to the public before that information becomes public. Im a fed and we have annual mandatory training out the wazoo on these kinds of rules, as well as frequent reminder emails from the ethics folks and/or the IGs office. But would the government do that? This is a long way to go for a publicity stunt. my boss read my Skype conversations, parental involvement with employees under 18, and more, my manager and coworker are secretly dating, boss will never give exceeds expectations because he has high standards, and more, update: I supervise a manager who falsified an employee write-up but I dont think she should be fired, stolen sandwiches, disgusting fridges, dish-washing drama: lets talk about office kitchen mayhem, interviewer scolded me for my outfit, job requires an oath of allegiance, and more, update: a DNA test revealed the CEO is my half brother and hes freaking out, my entry-level employee gave me a bunch of off-base criticism. I always appreciate your combination of kindness and firm clarity. "Even if it were, transmitting some personal data by email does not of itself breach data protection laws in any jurisdiction" Actually in the UK the Data Protection Act would apply as it is being transmitted outside of the company without the express authorisation from the data subject. There were maybe 50 of us on the team for the app. The details dont really matter. She would ask every rep if they were using TEAPOT o service accounts, and would proudly exclaim, My daughter built TEAPOT! She thought she was connecting with the people who helped her. I would have ratted you out too. An employer of mine got a FOIA request where they asked for every email wed sent to anyone from any regulatory agency. Which is not how I would handle things now, but I was a lot younger and in a bad place in my personal life, so. I dont know the OPs financial status but if she needed the $$$ its not that easy to look at it as a kindness in the moment. Im not feeding a narrative, Im expressing my opinion. This is one reason why I could only ever give a vague explanation of what my dad did. I have also had to recommend the firing of a personal friend. Is this the appropriate place to bring up Anthony Scaramucci not even uttering the phrase off-the-record during his bizarre call to Ryan Lizza and then being upset when his words were published? > On Monday, I was called into a fact-finding meeting with HR. If that is so, there is nothing you can do to avoid the termination and you should be looking for new employment. Only behaviors are right or wrong. Journalists seek out and report information thats their job.. It also protects the coworker from any immediate threats or retribution by LW. OP wasnt a journalist. (Presumably easier to get caught via company comms but doesnt make the leak any different imo). I didnt know how to say it without seeming to condone the breach. Its a common occurrence, especially within a large business where autocorrect can incorrectly select people with similar names. But at the end of the day, the reputational risk to my company, versus the relatively low-level risk of having to replace someone entry-level, was just too great to bear. Its no worse than our organization doesnt protect classified information no matter how badly an employee disregards policies. It helps you to catch context-driven mistakes such as adding the wrong recipient, attaching the wrong file, or forgetting to use Bcc instead of cc. In a couple of hours, the news agencies were calling the federal government, to verify the news. OP, if everything that was predictably risky, harmful, dangerous, bad, illegal or wrong really felt bad on some core level, we would almost never need to make rules. OP should be counting their blessings they only got fired and be upset with themselves for making such an obvious and preventable error, not expecting a large bureaucracy to break its own rules to accommodate them. Also, the OP wont be able to ever claim the good work experience she gained from the role. Leaking to the press can come with criminal penalties and you need to be very careful with how you report illegal/dangerous information for your own protection. When we think about misdirected email, we often put ourselves in the shoes of the sender. Id like to know what LW said at the two meetings they gave her before firing her. You take this as a hideously painful lesson, and change your behavior across the board, and most people could see that as a learning moment, from which you learned. And theres a difference between feeling (sensation) and feeling (conclusion drawn from integrating sensations and information). It simply means that your employees are not to disclose proprietary information or data about your company to another person without your consent. They sound far more serious than what happened. Breaking certain rules in the workplace, whether written or unwritten, may get you fired. What am I doing wrong here in the PlotLegends specification? Id instantly think that youd learned nothing, that no information we kept around you would be secure, and that anything we brought to you as far as behavior we needed you to change would suddenly be labeled as victimless and only because *truly irrelevant fact here* and unfair. In this situation, it is acceptable to make 'fear of attachment' jokes. There is no other guarantee, and yet people count on it. Much as we like to think confidentiality is transferrablethat as long as the people we tell keep things confidential we didnt breach confidentiality to tell themits not. Yep, I think its worth LW remembering that while she knew shed never leak anything again, her boss and co-workers dont. Later when I moved on, it became my absolute best interview topic when asked about a mistake and how I handled it. Im still pretty upset that I had no second chance, but I suppose I just lost their trust. I am not falling on the sword or putting my job on the line for a coworker. someone in another department saw the post, reached out to the person who made it and asked for information about the person they had heard it from. January 31, 2022 . Yes, when I worked at a financial firm I believe that exact question was on a privacy training test: If I run across the name of a celebrity in the client management system while performing my duties, its okay to tell friends and family about it, True or False?. I love telling people things! Everyone makes mistakes at all points in our careers. But your wording indicates that you dont yet have insight into just how much you breached the trust of your company. Thats the one that needs to learn to keep things to herself? It might just be that the scanners caught it and notified security. OP thinks she was super discreet in texting her friend. Frequently there would be confidential news like, The tiger had her baby and its a girl! or Were getting hippos! that we couldnt share with the public for a few days (to be sure the baby was healthy and would survive past a critical period, or so the news could be shared in the way the marketing department deemed appropriate, or whatever.) Completely unrelated to the topic at hand, love the username! If it bleeds, it leads, and if its not bleeding, you might as well kick it a few times to see if itll start bleeding Nope. It doesnt matter that the information is going public next week. You will bounce back! Thats real life. If youre excited about a new, increased source of funding, that shows your agency has money to spend. The penalty for breach of confidentiality isn't restricted to employees who have . ), Im guessing it was something more like: She already acknowledged that its 100% her fault. Yep! How is an ETF fee calculated in a trade that ends in less than a year? It was bad. The org needed to know in order to assess potential damage and limit future opportunities. Thats when it gets tricky. Its hard to imagine what at a government job could be SOOO Exciting! He had a fairly high security clearance and was stationed at NORAD for a time. Ive represented or advised friends, friends of friends and the occasional famous person, and nobody else knows anything about it nor will they ever. I can imagine all kinds of things that wouldnt be that exciting to the world but that I would still want to tell a friend. But from there you can talk about what you learned from the experience and how this makes you a better employee/candidate now. Dont disagree feelings arent wrong but the way we think about them often is. The type of sanctions that Contract Killer is talking about would only apply to confidential records, not non-public records. Firing you was probably not what they wanted to do, and Im sorry. Remember to be kind to yourself: youre human, you made a mistake and, as you said, youve learned from it. 4. Conversely, I cant tell him about certain things from my work, though at least he knows what I do. The ex-coworker reached out to me asking if I could send them a copy of the report so they didnt have to start from scratch and repeat the same work they had already done. There ARE circumstances in which keep this confidential means you can tell very close, trusted people about it as they did in the letter. ); Im also thinking of someone I know whose work depends on his being able to drive who got a DUI last year, and someone who essentially had a full emotional breakdown in a workplace I was in when I was a lot younger, who ended up under her desk sobbing and throwing things). But what might walk that back to a performance plan would be a sincere, unqualified apology showing understanding of the gravity of the error. If you break certain unspoken rules, you can lose your job or ruin your career. As I read it, LWs friend couldnt pass the information along at all. Man I am swamped with the publicly known project I am barely treading water. Its also possible that she got caught in a broader crackdown on leaks and thus wasnt given a second chance when she otherwise might have been. I made a similar dumb mistake in my first professional job by sharing something that wasnt sensitive but was nonetheless governed by a broad company-wide confidentiality policy a complaint email sent to our companys contact us address by a customer whose name and address I had omitted. Heres what to do. UK officials are bound by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act and people have gone to prison for giving information to journalists before now. In a job interview, how do I explain why I was fired? If its obvious who the email was intended for, just forward it on and cc the original sender, letting them know what youve done. I have a whole bunch of very personal medical information swimming around my memory and I while some of it Ive wished I could share with my spouse, I never have. As a government employee they are obligated to report a breach of information regardless of whether they like the employee they are reporting or hate their guts. Doesnt matter if it was a friend. If each person tells just one person it can end up being a lot of people. Thank you it was getting boring to read everyones outrage. She could have been a secretary or a spy; no one knows because she went to her grave never telling anyone, not even her husband. Because they turned out to not be trustworthy. Between that and having family members who have been laid off and lost access to their work account that they used for personal use as well, I have learned to keep work and personal email accounts separate. Heres one: You work for the Census Bureau , which runs demographic surveys beyond the decennial Census, and came across [popular celebrity]s personal info, perhaps noting they live near you. When theres something I really want to share with my wife, I mask it, pretty much what we do here talking about how the client invested in llama shearings, or called up asking about rumours of purple llamas, or asked us to sell all their teapots that kind of thing. Like, its so obviously wrong that people dont even talk about it. This is a solvable problem. The info is out, the tech used to spread it is irrelevant and a distraction from the problem. She has to protect her job and reputation as well in the end, she shouldnt have to risk her own job stability due to your choices! 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. Unfortunately, a lot of times people mistake the first for the second. Its to LWs friends credit that she didnt pass on the info to a journalistic colleague who DOES work in that area; its not to LWs credit. I dont think you have to be Catholic.). Trying to understand how to get this basic Fourier Series, Linear regulator thermal information missing in datasheet. ), This didnt involve a records request. 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. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. In those cases I have to be even more careful, because minor details might get linked to the news story and suddenly its not anonymous any more. I wonder LW, would your interactions with the higher ups have been different if your co-worker/mentor had given you the heads up that she was going to have to report this? It may help in your next position to transpose your thinking around these things a bit. I think if the OP had framed the situation as, how can I get another job after being fired for being a whistleblower after I shared important but unfortunately confidential information with a journalist because the public has a right to know, these comments would be very different.

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