can you get fired for accidentally sending confidential information can you get fired for accidentally sending confidential information

Its a risk when you ignore these compliance issues especially willfully. For the other 2 questions, I would simply urge you to remove the phrase ratted out from your professional vocabulary. I think its fair for you to be upset that you didnt have another chance, but also understandable that your employer felt it couldnt give you one. 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). and sent to multiple people (!!)? She shared *exciting* embargoed information. Some offenses are serious enough that a single incident is enough to fire someone. Only behaviors are right or wrong. Request a personalized demo to see how Egress Prevent will help you prevent data breaches over email. What am I doing wrong here in the PlotLegends specification? It may be unfair to assume a journalist is cutthroat and would kill for a lead, but its also nave to assume they wouldnt let anything slip to the exact wrong person. Submitting a contact form, sending a text message, making a phone call, or leaving a voicemail does not create an attorney-client relationship. Access rules are very, very strict, and there are reminders all the time. That makes a certain subset of people *extremely* excited. In addition to Alisons script, I think it also reflects well on you that you reported what you had done. I have also had to recommend the firing of a personal friend. This reminds me of how Northwestern Hospital had to fire 50 employees back in March for violating HIPAA by accessing Jussie Smolletts medical records. The person is trying to make someone else feel bad about their own transgressions. Sometimes their hands are tied too. I get that youre trying to take responsibility here, but your Im still pretty upset that I had no second chance, I suppose suggests to me you still have a long way to go toward recognizing and acknowledging the seriousness of what happened. It may help you to know that the dreaded why are you unemployed right now question doesnt come up in every interview. e.g. If not, an investigation would be started on which employees were poking around in Famous Persons account and why. I would not immediately snap into how can I report this? But from there you can talk about what you learned from the experience and how this makes you a better employee/candidate now. I tell the character and imagine their response, and the urge to share subsides. Only hope going forward is own up flatly and without defensiveness . I was fired over the phone. Whats not fine is trying to take somebody elses, or dramatically moping about it until someone gives me theirs. Companies (and governments) want to carefully manage the messaging and strategy around information that is released in order to bring the biggest buzz and the best information to the public. 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. So Id do what Alison says here, and save your OMG I cant keep this in confessions for your pets. Period. An employer of mine got a FOIA request where they asked for every email wed sent to anyone from any regulatory agency. 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. Not necessarily for the leaking but for the way youre talking about it. The rules are severe because people need externals to keep them motivated. Not saying you did this! Upon further investigation, the supervisor discovers that the employee has asked other employees to also send Company documents to her personal e-mail address. Heres what to do. Like, its so obviously wrong that people dont even talk about it. Even if this person had not turned her in, there was this bomb just sitting there waiting to go off. Im just explaining that the information was likely a non-public record and not a confidential record. Right. But heres the thing you still have to have a ton of discretion about how you share and where. Dont blame the co-worker for ratting you out. Have you learned from your mistake? But doing so would likely out the department LW worked for, and probably LW herself. Its like winning the jackpot in a slot machine then declaring that you KNEW you were going to win, so it wasnt really gambling at all. We were interviewing someone who had broken the #1 cardinal ethical rule in our industry (a branch of health care). This is a tough lesson to learn. However, I will agree that, per OPs statement, the information appears to be unsolicited and doesnt seem like it would have been considered a records request (who knows, we dont have a lot of information and what we have has been proven to be distorted). That was a stressful week for all concerned. I am very sure they didnt want to fire him. 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. Id say forgive that coworker NOWyou put her in a terrible position by being a big blabbering blabbermouth. If a member of your staff violates this explicit. 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: And I told Mom, so so so many times that I didnt build it myself! It could be that the info you leaked was especially confidential, or that theyve been concerned about other leaks and are taking a hard-line stance. If Jane knows, then it cant be too bad.. [duplicate]. Please keep reflecting on this. Maybe OPs workplace does the same? Now I just leave and cry and deal with the long-term consequences, like never moving up. The advance knowledge of something pending going public is a very powerful position. Also, she wasnt a journalist I ever interacted with professionally shes a friend Ive had for years. I have personally learned that if you never want coworkers to find out something embarrassing or private about you, never ever tell them. this is one of the reasons why its best to have a mentor who is NOT at the same company as you. Well 1.) Thats a horrendously burdensome thing to ask! It doesnt matter if your friend is a journalist or not; thats a total red herring. How exciting! and I started reading the details from the email out loud to him. Im still pretty upset that I had no second chance, but I suppose I just lost their trust. Im not feeding a narrative, Im expressing my opinion. This friend understood the gravity of the information I told her, and I 100% trusted her to not leak it. Has 90% of ice around Antarctica disappeared in less than a decade? Leaking information can actually be the right thing in some cases. You could say that, but itd be a lie, which would be an automatic dealbreaker for many potential employers, and theres no guarantee that the previous employer would keep the cause for firing secret. It was super not personal, it was just a situation were second chances were not given, period. Yes, you can get fired for opening a phishing email. But I dont think this applies in any case since it was on her personal cell. Yep, I have a friend whose grandmother was a codebreaker and took loose lips sink ships seriously till her dying day. Im going to go see how they reviewed it.). You might add to Alisons script, I knew immediately that I needed to report my indiscretion, and I did so right away. This just wasnt the place for you in the end. 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. it doesnt count as they reported themselves if they later say they were ratted out by the person they reported it to. The LW actually had a responsibility to keep the info confidential, and the friend doesnt. Protect your people from socially engineered phishing attacks, Defend against attacks originating from compromised supply chain accounts, Detect fraudulent invoices and payment requests, Prevent people falling victim to targeted impersonation attacks, Defend against the delivery of ransomware and malware by email, Stop phishing attacks that lead to credential theft, Prevent email data loss caused by human error, Block exfiltration of personal and company data, Preserve ethical walls to prevent disclosure of information and avoid conflicts of interest, Apply the appropriate level of encryption to sensitive emails and attachments, Detect and prevent advanced email threats that slip through Microsoft 365, Provide people with easy, actionable advice in real-time at the point of risk, How to use a hacker's toolkit against them. Alisons given you great words to say now its to you to live out your learning with sincerity and build trust with a new employer. Is it possible to rotate a window 90 degrees if it has the same length and width? If you live in a place where its illegal to shoot guns into the air, and you shoot a gun into the air and the bullet does not actually kill anyone in its fall, you have still broken the law and placed others in danger. They are not neutral. OP, I join Alison in wishing you the very best of luck! You hear something genuinely classified and blab it too because its so cool? Hopefully there still something to be said for that! assigning women extra work to help them, calling out when youre in the ER, and more. She got paid to pose as Roeders* mistress, once. Did you apologize profusely and then explain that there was some miscommunication here? We all developed what we called the [cityname] twitch of looking over our shoulders before we talked about work stuff in a public place. Im not cleared for it. I dont mean to sound harsh but you really need to break out of this frame of mind. (Drunk driving is an extreme example of this. Some are minor, some are devastating. Contact the GDPR manager at once. This makes it seem like they owe LW something, to be loving and release her to her best life. 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. So mention it only if explicitly asked. Nowadays with mobile devices, email and the cloud, it is extremely easy to share files, easy enough that we may accidentally send and share them to the wrong person. She cut a guys LVAD wires so that hed be bumped up to the top of the heart transplant donor list? Im excited about the project I started today or Something cool is happening at work would be fine to say in most situations. The emphasis on how not harmful the infraction was is totally hurting your case, OP. You just seem to still want an answer and I picked up on this as a possible avenue to reflect on in your letter. Under the "General" tab, you'll see a section called "Undo send.". reading. All we know is that OP made a disclosure, and the coworker is aware the disclosure happened via Slack. Ive seen many workplaces that dont spend an amount of time discussing confidentiality that is commensurate with its importance, or that dont go into specifics about when it is and isnt ok to tell somebody something you heard at work, and a general statement tends not to hold up to the in-the-moment excitement of oooooh I know THING about CELEBRITY! or whatever. Thank you it was getting boring to read everyones outrage. When I asked about the job move he said he had failed to make a required disclosure on a sale and so was fired, but how he took it to heart and had behaved since. A statement added: 'Irish Ferries crews train regularly to deal with incidents at sea, and the company has put its training into action and the fire has been extinguished. "It is likely not private if the employee used the employer . You're fired for violation but convince the Dept of Labor that no one without an IT degree could ever understand your policy. First coworker was fired in spite of the fact that he was a brilliant and (normally) even tempered guy with years of work at the corporation. How do I politely turn down the call for an interview by another employer? Im not sure you can conclude that it was publically disclosable. If you got the launch codes for the missiles, thats a big no no to share. You committed battery.