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. This is a great point LW. That response will likely impress an employer that she has grown and learned, that she is honest and has some self-awareness, and that she would be worth trusting. Goes a long way to being the right way to describe this. Blame yourself for breaking the rules. Certainly not an electronic blog. I empathize, having both been in government service where the people can let the boundaries get too loose and, separately, had a career-breaking moment in a toxic workplace. can you get fired for accidentally sending confidential information. If a member of your staff violates this explicit. This is one reason why I could only ever give a vague explanation of what my dad did. No. They may. Whats not fine is trying to take somebody elses, or dramatically moping about it until someone gives me theirs. Fwiw the journalist agreed to destroy the info. We asked them why they did it. Its going to be a hurdle. Obviously leaking to one journalist that youre friends with is better than leaking to a whole Slack channel full of them, but partly because its possible to do the first innocently, whereas theres no question of innocence with the latter. Sent a confidential email to the wrong address? OP: Move to a sector and a position where you wont be called upon to handle confidential information, and admit that you are doing so because youve recognised your own limitations and are willing to actively avoid being a liability to your future employer. "It is likely not private if the employee used the employer . They may very well have not had the option to give you a second chance, whether you wanted to or not. All rights reserved. I feel like this misses the overall lesson Allison is trying to impart here. Same applies here as you stated. So have a lot of other people who have managed to find other jobs. A recent Harvard Business Review article indicated widespread use in the workplace, with over one third of the US . Youre heading in the right direction, and youve also gotten some really good advice. Thats an important impulse to explore to avoid other similar situations with gossip. Or if youd like to start a trial, get in touch and well be more than happy to arrange a free demo with your IT team. For example, a lot of insider trading is based on the TIMING of someone finding out information. Letting stuff out early could mean that goes off with a whimper instead of a bang and might be a financial difference in driving extra purchases for that initial season, and the implication of The Things staying power if it doesnt do well enough during that time. I was coming to the comments section to say the same thing. But I think in order to talk about this with future employers, youve got to take more responsibility for it. OOPS! Its unfortunate that LW lost her job over it but the coworker isnt to blame for LWs decision to disclose information they werent supposed to. Well, this is both unkind and off-base. My (unclear) point is that there are some options for OP that extend beyond you can never share anything before its public with anyone ever and completely change career tracks.. Im not sure you can conclude that it was publically disclosable. You got a hard hit, and I am sorry for all the difficulty that causes. This was also my thought. It sucks this happened, and Im sorry that this was the way it all went down. No, not if its classified or embargoed. Whilst Im sure the OP is a perfectly nice person, theres a reason that there are office shootings and other awful things, some people are not. I would feel terrible about it, definitely, and probably think about it for a while after, but ultimately, Id need to prioritize my family and act in a way that would protect my job/salary/health insurance so I could continue to provide for my them. By Candice Novak. With regards to getting a new job within the software engineering/analytics/data science field, I wouldn't lie on application form and in interviews if asked why I left my old job. If you want to work in comms, you need to be crystal clear that the TIMING of disclosure is a crucial issue. Concepts like snitching, tattling, and ratting out dont apply in the workplace. Ah! 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. She cut a guys LVAD wires so that hed be bumped up to the top of the heart transplant donor list? Since that didnt happen Im not surprised you werent given a second chance. Im assuming the LW plead their case and filled in relevant information. Share information about a Harry Potter book before it being officially released? Its no more blind-siding because the coworker reported the issue, than it would be if, say, IT had reported it after monitoring OPs traffic. We can think things without saying them out loud. and that person did what they were told to do and reported it. But folks with strong confidentiality duties often dont disclose the confidential parts of the information to their trusted confidants or partners. And maybe you should go next week, because the slots love you and you always win. Like, firing on the spot if I access my own chart. If youre excited about a new, increased source of funding, that shows your agency has money to spend. I think thats a ridiculous overreach but whatever). If each person tells just one person it can end up being a lot of people. Is there a solution to add special characters from software and how to do it. OP is in a pickle for sure. As far as I know, he held the highest security clearance a civilian could have. The info is out, the tech used to spread it is irrelevant and a distraction from the problem. Embarrassing or inappropriate communications sent via company email can damage professional credibility, reputations, and careers. Absolutely! Better to have a 30% chance than a 0% chance. Oh my. Im not feeding a narrative, Im expressing my opinion. Agreed. Now were just nitpicking the OPs words here. When weve made a mistake, it often feels unfair when we dont get an opportunity to explain, defend, and/or redeem ourselves. Every hospital Ive worked at requires yearly HIPAA compliance training. Not because my coworker ratted me out, but because I came to her for guidance and instead of being straight with me, she made me think it would be OK only to be questioned hours later. But what you do when youre on the other side of the inbox? 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 I also wanted to address a couple things that jumped out at me in this part: Also, am I even allowed to bring up the fact that someone ratted me out? It's really just a 30 . Me too. If I were in the coworkers position, I would need to do the same thing. I work for a charity that offers a telephone service nationwide, and I take a lot of calls from people in quite distressing situations. Agreed, that immediately got on my nerves. A further 2 years can be added onto the sentence for aggravated identity theft. There are, unfortunately, many things I am doomed to not know even though I would really like to find out. Then the stories died down and the pressure with it even though there were still occasional leaks. We all make stupid mistakes. No. LW, please, please look hard at what happened and how you can promise yourself first of all that this was the last time. Everything the OP described sounds like a non-public record. Regulation people have heard of is going to be changed/repealed and its a big deal Yeah just assume that for the next few years youre out of the running for jobs that require a confidentiality. Minimizing it will make it harder for future employers to trust OP, whereas frank ownership and an action plan will read as much more responsible and accountable. So, the implication is actually the opposite of giving your feelings 100% credence its saying, separate how you feel from what you do. This seems like a no-brainer to just not do, and if you did, certainly not to tell someone at work that you did this. Im also a public affairs officer for a government agency- one that almost exclusively deals with highly classified information. Like its going to be easier to find a job because she has the integrity to say she got fired. The damage from most leaks isnt visible until much later, but it can be massive. How is an ETF fee calculated in a trade that ends in less than a year? I agree with Alisons response. That guilt is because you KNEW you did something that was explicitly not allowed, and you went to your coworker in the hopes theyd absolve you of your guilty conscious. I guess you just say I inadvertently let an important piece of information get out and I will take extraordinary safeguards to never let that happen again. Confidentiality can stink at an interpersonal level, everyone tends to talk about their work and it can be hard to hide things from people we care about. 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. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. You are fortunate to get the opportunity to learn it early when it hasnt resulted in severe long term consequences. Where I work, there are policies that state an employee that finds out about certain kinds of misconduct is mandated to report it or face consequences if it comes out that they knew and didnt report it. We see people destroy themselves with guilt, and so we try to tell people theres no need to feel guilty or ashamed. Id like to know what LW said at the two meetings they gave her before firing her. But thats not what happened here. Yes, the ratted me out thing is probably not a fair assessment of what actually happened here. And maybe they can, and maybe that chain will end with someone who doesnt forward the info on, or peter out once the information does become public in this case. You seriously violated your privileged access to confidential information. Don't say "I was escorted out by armed guards" where you can say "My manager was disappointed enough to let me go". You've learned from this mistake and had no malicious intent. Dang! Thats the one that needs to learn to keep things to herself? 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. Confiding in an older mentor in the expectation of confession-like confidentiality? 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. 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 . We got [Celebrity Y] to promote a big public health initiative! Your feelings are wrong, in this context means,Your feelings arent *morally* wrong.. Disclosing confidential information has, at best, resulted in nothing, and at worse, resulted in injury/death, or even political systems toppling. In jobs that require non-disclosure, active disclosure is a very big deal. If its a marketing message, spam, or something that looks entirely unimportant simply delete and move on. No, no, no, no, no. Its not a victimless crime and you have to understand the seriousness of what you did, even unintentionally. The company I work for uses keyloggers and text scanners on our computers to catch these kinds of issues. I was an HR coordinator at a hospital and even though I did not deal with patient records or patients or anything remotely health care-y, I was required to take the annual training and accept compliance as a mandatory part of my employment. It could also end poorly if the employer actually sees a job opening posted for the position the LW claims was eliminated. Head of the department who everyone hates for non-scandal reasons is stepping down amid a scandal We literally filled a room with records for them, and 99% of it was people asking what flavor of donuts to bring to a meeting or requesting copies of informational flyers. Gov employee here and I would be in trouble as well for not reporting what LW told coworker. Yeah, this is an excellent point. I would not immediately snap into how can I report this? Maintaining confidentiality is a foundational occupational requirement in a lot of fields. It doesnt matter if theyd trust this person with their firstborn child. In government, keep this confidential almost always means never share ever on pain of serious legal sanctions.. While I dont think the LW should be endlessly flagellating herself, this was her fault, not the co-worker. If that is so, there is nothing you can do to avoid the termination and you should be looking for new employment. The problem here is that the OP misjudged the level of confidentially expected in the situation, and maybe by their office/profession in general. The type of sanctions that Contract Killer is talking about would only apply to confidential records, not non-public records. 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): And it makes sense that it is. Right. My worry, OP, is that you dont see this as sufficiently serious to warrant a firing but I promise you that in most communications positions, it really likely would be. Oh, I wish Id seen this before replying. They know it happens. If her friend never told anyone it never would have gotten out. Does that matter? But how do I explain this to show I learnt from my mistake and get a new job. Im interested in the fact that the journalist friend is described as 100% trustworthy. I replaced someone who had embezzled from the (small) company. As a sidenote: *Even if* you think it *wasnt* a big deal, when you get hauled into the boss office and told it. Here are five such rules, most of which were broken by Block (who reportedly left Oracle yesterday.) Thats crazy (and crazy lucky for the embezzler). I think one can be upset at not getting a second chance without feeling necessarily entitled to one. They did exactly the right thing to you. More commonly it means that you either cant share anything, or you cant share parts that someone could connect to a particular client. As a fellow human being, I absolutely get the impulse to tell someone about something! You undertook those actions while working for (1) A Large Governmental Organization, who is answerable to Congress and to the general public for the actions undertaken by their employees, in the (2) Communications department, which is a department where employees will specifically, systematically, regularly be exposed to confidential information that should be kept confidential until such time as it is explicitly said to be something that can be shared publically. She should have just sat with that feeling and let it fuel her resolve to never share confidential info with an outside party again. If you find a colleague has breached confidentiality like this, procedures are typically clear that you DO NOT approach them yourself. Many Government Agencies have specific rules about reference checks. Practice talking about it until you can truly pull it off. 4. I am in this place when I read OPs response. And the young comment. If its something that would be a big deal for LWs friends news outlet to report first, not being able to say anything to the reporters who could write about it even, hey, I hear this might happen, you should make some calls! December 15, 2009, 1:05 PM. He and my mother kept their noses clean. Yes, this is the valuable lesson about how precarious trust is and how breaking it can have swift painful consequences! A 40 year old making the same mistake would be much harder to trust later. The phone rang in the middle of the night and my mother picked it up, before she could hand the phone to my father, the person on the other end of the phone explained everything that was going on and why he was calling. 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. You can do this, if you keep working hard on yourself. 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. I am a govt worker in NY. Unfortunately, a lot of times people mistake the first for the second. Agreed, except for this: a journalist, who by profession is at risk for leaking said confidential information. Someone would then check into it to see if there was a valid reason for someone to be poking at it. 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. This reminds me of the story of the Apple employee who left a prototype iPhone in a bar by mistake, before the official release. How did you talk to your boss about the slack channel full of journalists? Were you able to correct the factual mistake in context, and what phrasing did you use? 1) Slack vs text: doesnt matter. I screwed up in grad school and had to go in front of an IRB board for being sent information that I hadnt gotten full clearance for. Please do not include any confidential or sensitive information in a contact form, text message, or voicemail. whatever you think is appropriate] to make sure it doesnt happen again.. Especially since the letter seems to have been written almost immediately after the incident, before their feelings had time to settle properly. I wrote back and asked, Is there more context for why your coworker thought that? But doing so would likely out the department LW worked for, and probably LW herself. Here are the things that OP needs to remember: First, the coworker is not a rat, even if she misunderstood the scope of OPs unauthorized disclosure and mistakenly misrepresented it. I agree. We also got early warning that legislators were encouraged to resign, a day or two before the press releases. Thats why they told you the information was confidential. Not all non-public information is expected to be treated like a state secret, assuming youre not dealing with actual classified information or NDAs. You knew better. LW doesnt seem defensive at all here, and its okay to feel upset while still taking ownership of their actions. Your comment above is much closer to an effective track. Given how much we have learned about foreign intelligence operations in American social media in the last few years, this is yet another reason why information security of all levels is taken so seriously. Oh, this is all interesting, and I appreciate all the responses. Im not understanding how OPs update comment reads as defensiveit shows significant progression from deflection to ownership, to me. Many, many of us in similar positions have made similar mistakes. We all developed what we called the [cityname] twitch of looking over our shoulders before we talked about work stuff in a public place. If the email involves sensitive information, this could be a serious problem for the people involved. This will sound very, VERY strange, but if you have the urge to share things youre not supposed to, theres a trick you can try: telling a fictional character in an imaginary conversation. Privacy Policy and Affiliate Disclosures. What am I doing wrong here in the PlotLegends specification? Yeah, I thought it was from her personal cell too. 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. But according to the LW, the trusted friend would not have blabbed, so if the LW didnt tell the coworker, the company would have never known and everything would be hunky dory. When you are genuinely accept the error, analyze why you made it and address how to alter yourself to not be vulnerable to this kind of mistake again, it will naturally come across when you talk about it in interviews because youll be genuine and not trying to find a strategic angle and that genuine quality will land well with other mature professionals who have made their own mistakes. Its to prevent covering of tracks or retaliation or extinction bursts (Im about to be caught for X may as well make the punishment worthwhile and do Y and Z too, or if they are acting with deliberate malign intent Im caught, better leak as much as possible asap). I see a lot of people saying that its always wrong to share confidential information with the press, and thats not necessarily true. 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. 2. Second chances arent a foregone conclusion in any aspect of life or work; your expectation that there should have been one at all suggests a level of entitlement that needs to be examined. LW, you are too focused on using some incorrect details to mitigate the main point: you were a trusted professional who broke one of the most basic policies in the world of communications. I dont want to beat up on the LW, but I do think they fundamentally need to understand that the loss of trust made it impossible for the agency to give you a second chance in this position. That would likely lead to your manager also getting fired (for not firing you in the first place) and also make your entire department/agency look bad to the public (whod be wondering who else still working there has done something similar without getting fired). and starting the work of rebuilding reputation. You certainly don't need to blurt out a 5 minute monologue unprompted, but you do want to be ready to answer these questions because they will come up if you disclose what happened as you intend to. In this situation, I reported myself is simply false, given OPs expectation that her mentor wouldnt pass along what she knew to anyone else. A good . They care a little more in the last 2 years, but not much. A majority of those who work from home would use their own personal digital devices such as laptop, tablet or mobile to perform their daily work tasks and it is also convenient for employees to. Id had excellent feedback up until then (if this is true), but I mistakenly shared some non-public information with a friend outside the agency, and they let me go as a result. Recently, the National Guard was hit with a data breach, where files containing personal information were unintentionally transferred to a "non-DoD-accredited data center by a . Most companies will not say so-and-so was fired for doing x in a reference check. However, it is unlikely that the circumstances of your firing will be able to be overlooked by an employer who needs to trust your judgment with sensitive data, definitely for the foreseeable future, possibly for many years into your career. They are not neutral. 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. It pretty much doesnt matter what field you are in the higher up you go the more likely you are to be privy to information that you MUST NOT share no matter how excited you may be. Yeah, if the LW is in the US or things operate the same way in their country, theres no point in trying to lie or even waffle about what happened. Yes. If I wanted a cookie and I didnt get one, I can feel sad, and thats fine. Its so very context and field dependent. It has to be violent sexual assault before theyll even consider responding. I work in retail, and the company has yearly mandatory training on How to handle confidential info. People do stupid or extreme things all the time; their lives dont end, but they *can* be turning points for a downward spiral. I wish I lived in your country. As a government employee she would have been trained on that rule and should have fully understood the ramifications of breaking it. Fired for gross misconduct because I sent confidential information to personal mailbox - how do I get another job? Does your company know she could have called the police? Feelings can be irrational though, or overblown, or immature, or any number of shades of wrong that means you shouldnt give them 100% credence. exciting! And that doesnt even take into account that I could be prosecuted for divulging any private information. Acidity of alcohols and basicity of amines, Using indicator constraint with two variables. 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. 2.) In this case you will get a second chance it will just be with another employer. Not me. Employees. If someone stole money from their workplace, or illegally harassed a coworker, and their colleague reported it would that person be a rat too? Once its out, you have no control over it. LW, we are all human. If you shared something with me that I didnt ask you about or probe for, and just knowing it could jeopardize my reputation or career you bet your ass Id share it with our manager. Or does it only matter that I broke a rule? Thats a horrendously burdensome thing to ask! If she really understood or valued confidentiality, she would not be trying to convince us of how victimless this was. The focus moving forward should be about realizing how serious a problem it was, how badly you feel about it, and how youre committed to not making the same mistake again. Dan is such a pain! This is a much more fulsome explanation of what I meant! I understand the issue had to be reported, but why this way ? I agree with you! When they took the only course of action they could have taken and still kept their job and notified your employer of your actions, you became defensive of your actions. Life may not look better in 6 months but I bet it does in 3 years. Is anyone else dying to know what the information was? This reminds me of people whose response to hearing no is well, how do we get to a yes? LWs response to this was unacceptable and we cannot have a person on our staff who would do this, was Oh, okay, well, next time I have a similar opportunity here I wont do this.. And even worse when it can have legal implications like for insider trading or government secrecy. OP came to her, she felt guilty, they apparently talked about this a bit, so why not tell her that this cant be kept secret and she has to come forward to her boss ? Training in this area is important generally, but a communications/ PR person should not need to be reminded to keep sensitive information confidential thats a very basic aspect of the job. I didnt know how to say it without seeming to condone the breach. Noooooo. OP erred, which she knows, but I dont think that means her mentor no longer has the obligation to be honest with her.

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