How to not get fired from work for what you post or send online: Make sure your Facebook and social media accounts are locked down. Or did you double down on not my fault, not a big deal, and co-worker shouldnt have said anything? And youre a risk, on top of having done a fireable offense. The same goes for ratting out. Yes, this is the valuable lesson about how precarious trust is and how breaking it can have swift painful consequences! Journalists discuss things all the time that dont make it into published stories, or make it into stories that get killed, or get used for shaping further investigation, or even just as gossip. And not even trusting her not to publish it, but what if SHE got so excited by the news, just as LW did, that she just had to tell someone, and she picked someone that she trusted implicitly, and told them in strict confidence. In most reporting policies i am aware of it would be considered tipping off and get the person reporting in trouble. I dont love not being able to tell her things (even though we are each others I promise not to tell anybody (but Friend) person), the way we share this information is by forwarding press releases once the information is public. For me, that was it. Its not the end of the world as long as you adjust your thinking going forward and really try to understand why confidentiality policies exist. Journalists seek out and report information thats their job. Just *looking* at the account would get you noticed and your hand slapped (if you were lucky). Leaking information can actually be the right thing in some cases. one last post-script: this person wasnt super good at their job, but was a teammate i worked closely with, and doubt they had been put on a PIP prior to this. The sharing of information is a violation of your professional duties and ethics and would get me 60% of the way to firing someone if I were your boss. Yeah, seconding this. I would not immediately snap into how can I report this? Which is actually good most of us get making a mistake when were young, and really learning from it. How is an ETF fee calculated in a trade that ends in less than a year? I imagine there are a lot like that in government but he learned from working with a non apologetic, scandal plagued politician that consequences of what seems little to you may not be to the tabloids. Everyone makes mistakes at all points in our careers. Yup! Disclosing Government information to a journalist (even a friend in confidence) without permission is a major breach of confidence and Im not surprised it resulted in a significant sanction. How on earth could you know this was a misunderstanding? I even tell friends this who work in classified situations and I dont even report the news anymore.). I was sent home, and then fired over the phone a few hours later. update: is my future manager a bigoted jerk? Or they might have a zero-tolerance policy for leaks as a deterrent. But imagine you are the government and someone leaked information. 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.. Youre heading in the right direction, and youve also gotten some really good advice. If there were excetions, that would be explicitly stated. 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. In my experience, it was highly effective. Your contract can still be terminated if you violate a lawful . My guess is thats where some of the defensiveness in the initial letter comes from that no one would have known if not for the self-report. Our newspapers report quite frequently on gossip of whats happening behind the scenes. No checking out salary information permitted! And this will definitely have an effect on how you come across to people interviewing you in future. Sometimes were lucky and there arent any repercussions. When we make mistakes, they are impactful, but we're human and it happens. 1) Slack vs text: doesnt matter. Sharing HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL info with a JOURNALIST? Have you learned from your mistake? All three have kept their mouths shut, at least to the best of my knowledge, and I can talk it over without worrying that I will cause a problem with my disclosing. Maybe you let them know more then they should even without meaning too? Quite recently, a client of my firm contacted us to say they had heard staff in a bar gossiping about another client. And I told Mom, so so so many times that I didnt build it myself! While I agree that this needs to be explained in the right way. All rights reserved. Fwiw the journalist agreed to destroy the info. But when I wrote letters to the llama farmers whose llamas had bitten a client whose story about her life-threatening goat allergy was featured in the papers (obviously this is not what actually happened), I had to be sure I didnt say anything about the llama farmer letters that could link to the goat story. 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. Maybe she had to report it for her job (as some people are speculating) but even still, its okay to be annoyed at someone even if its not 100% logical. If any of those connections were being intercepted by an unknown third party, however, you've just put your customer's data into their hands. Disclosing confidential information has, at best, resulted in nothing, and at worse, resulted in injury/death, or even political systems toppling. Feelings can be irrational though, or overblown, or immature, or any number of shades of wrong that means you shouldnt give them 100% credence. As a government employee she would have been trained on that rule and should have fully understood the ramifications of breaking it. If someone used the words ratted me out or told on me in an interview, that would be pretty much an immediate DQ for me as it shows a total lack of personal responsibility and maturity. And the coworker, well, this was information that was a major conduct infraction, not just embarrassing or private if a coworker told me theyd done this, Id have promptly reported it, not to humiliate them, but to start the process of damage control. Every hospital Ive worked at requires yearly HIPAA compliance training. OP if I was part of an interview for you, and you brought up this situation the way its phrased here, Im sorry to say it would be an immediate pass. I agree with you! Its completely understandable that you were upset about it when you wrote in (and upset about it now). I am very, very lucky. What OP did was incredibly serious and, as happened, a fireable offense. You violated your contract so your previous employer had little choice but to let you go - your new employer will understand this but if you show them you've accepted responsibility for it and will make sure never to do that again then I think you've got a good chance of getting another position. Dont blame the co-worker for ratting you out. Any message that starts with Oh honey is going to read as rude and condescending unless its followed by a sincere Im so sorry in response to something terrible happening. Even if you trust her 100%, she is still too high risk. 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). Both your friend AND your co-worker. Sure, thered be a record in Slack of prior messages. And in the future if you really cant hold something in (that is not full on illegal to discuss) and want to share it with your spouse or something, dear God dont ever do it in writing! It was a couple of telling E-mails that helped bring down Bear Stearns with the subprime loan mess crashing . Having said that, as a hiring manager, if you were able to talk to me about how this one-time error in judgment caused a deep shift in thinking and was a critical pivot point in your professional development I would hear you out. Unfortunately, there are instances where employees have accidentally leaked confidential information. Received someone elses confidential email? Yes. and sent to multiple people (!!)? Sometimes, like you said, you dont get a second chance. OP notes that she is a government employee. If I happened to expose that to my BIL who runs the comic book store and has a bunch of media and arts and entertainment contacts? 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. But OP gets to choose what they think the coworkers motivations may have been. Im just explaining that the information was likely a non-public record and not a confidential record. She should have told her this is serious and Im going to have to report you. Then at least OP could have avoided the slack room full of journalists escalation. Be careful. We dont know if the coworker intentionally or mistakenly misrepresented the scope of OPs disclosure. 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. Im not feeding a narrative, Im expressing my opinion. 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. It's really just a 30 . (Drunk driving is an extreme example of this. Is there a solution to add special characters from software and how to do it. Screw-ups happen. They thought it was funny and shared it with a couple more. Having worked in communications and journalism for the past 15 years, I think this ishonestly really bad. Sharing HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL info. If you had the same role in a public company, you could have have been fired because of regulations preventing insider trading. Wait, what the friend is a *journalist*?. If you had stayed they would have never trusted you again.. If I were you, I would examine WHY I decided to tell my journalist friend the info. As the other commenter noted, this could have been a very serious offence considering you were working for the government. Everyone absolutely everyone employed at a hospital has to undergo annual HIPAA compliance training. Yep! Both the affected parties were amazing clients who prided themselves on solid security practices. But given the kind of convo LW describes.while the LW really should not have been surprised they got reported and then fired, and does seem to be downplaying the severity, I wonder if something about the convo led them to believe it was somehow less serious than the mentor clearly understood it to be, and mentor didnt seem to do anything to help the LW understand how big a deal this is, which is kind of a bummer. should I be so emotionally drained by managing? They looked at themselves as an organization and realized that the damage was irrevocable. I have news from my job that I cannot share with some coworkers. They are pretty free with stating exactly why someone was fired. I was new to the field and had no idea how dysfunctional that workplace was. How should I explain that I'm looking for a job because my employer may be shutting down? Your coworker didnt choose to know this information and does not owe you silence. The penalty for breach of confidentiality isn't restricted to employees who have . The mistake was breaking company policy not that they announced to a coworker they broke company policy. Nah, I think the odds of whats super exciting to a government agency being equally exciting to me are pretty slim. Until the boys parents threw the uncle out. Thats the very last reporting step for something illegal/dangerous. (And thats before you tack on that LW thought it wasnt SO bad because he told Journalist Jason, who can keep a secret, as opposed to Reporter Robert, whos a real sieve.). And it seems like you do. Im going to go see how they reviewed it.). Our grant program is going to be fully funded by Congress! My first thought was of the whole JK Rowling / Robert Galbraith fiasco. If I ever texted a journalist about nonpublic information Id be fired. I dont think it was over company lines. In a professional context, close friendships and personal trust arent always as ironclad as they can be in personal relationships, particularly when it comes to security and confidentiality. Its also something that happens in a business relationship rather than a personal one, because the assumption is that personal relationships are entirely off the record. Yeah, this is an excellent point. Reporting misconduct is the right thing to do, and thats how an interviewer is going to see it. As I read it, LWs friend couldnt pass the information along at all. I used to work for Marvel Studios. 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. FOIA and open records requests are really big deals. And it makes sense that it is. 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. A true 100% owning of what you did. Then the second paragraph said Do not release this information to anyone outside of the office because the press are not to know about these changes until the morning of the event. Phishing emails are emails that appear to be from a legitimate source, but are actually from a malicious source. But I now realize that I had no business sharing my bad behavior with colleagues it put them into a completely untenable position. Thats real life. A major penalty for breach of confidentiality is termination of employment. Theres no such thing as blind-siding once youve committed an infraction and people have to act on it. Even there, be very sure the person youre talking to has the same access you do. So. Id spend some time processing how you felt and trying to learn to take accountability and personal responsibility for this (and seriously its something thats really uncomfortable and hard for everyone but it helps so much). My guess is that the LW was fired for a first offense because they refused to take responsibility for their breach. You said it yourself that you were working on client confidential information, and sent it to your personal mailbox. Thank you for pointing this out! Also, the OP wont be able to ever claim the good work experience she gained from the role. Instead, you gossiped about it and risked an announcement before things were ready. Yep, I have a friend whose grandmother was a codebreaker and took loose lips sink ships seriously till her dying day. 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. I work in retail, and the company has yearly mandatory training on How to handle confidential info. Another public sector worker here. But you see that now I hope. I agree. NEVER by email unless explicitly given the go-ahead). Can you explain to us what you learned? Take full responsibility. Yeah it totally sucks but now you at least have a chance to start fresh. I ran across an old letter recently where someone had negotiated themselves into a poor position, and hit on dragging some subordinates out there on the plank with her. This may have been part of why the manager took the steps she did. Oh, so LW cant keep a secret from her reporter friend or her coworker, but were ragging on the coworker for not keeping LWs secret? Yes! 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 anything went down, you could say But Older Coworker knew! I understand that you get that what you did was a very big deal as a single event, but I think you might need to spend some more time examining for yourself why you would describe this as a victimless crime. The fact that your friend didnt as far as you know tell anyone else about your bombshell doesnt meant that nothing happened. Right? Its also totally understandable that youre disappointed about losing your job, but they might have just considered that kind of confidentiality breach too much of a risk going forward. But how do I explain this to show I learnt from my mistake and get a new job. but if you mess up and by the skin of your teeth get away with it, just DO NOT talk about it with anyone at the company. This seems unnecessarily condescending, and I dont think the LW sounds defensive here at all. It might possibly be seen as less bad that the information shared was intended to be made public anyway, as opposed to it being information that wasnt ever supposed to get out. But what you were effectively asking your employer to do is trust a totally unknown (to them) journalist not to publish something that was apparently such exciting news that you, bound by confidentiality, simply couldnt keep quiet about it. Perhaps Archie neglected to mention it. How do I go about asking for a job on another team? Its a huge risk that if discovered by the employer would likely result in being blacklisted from the company and if the LW is employed there immediate termination. You made yourself very vulnerable, your mentor knew that, and unfortunately, youre now bearing the consequences. Similar in IT in my first internship, I had access to about 40,000 social security numbers. Goes a long way to being the right way to describe this. Whether or not you knew about the policy upfront, you need to be ready to discuss steps you take to stay informed about policies and ensure you're following them. Yeah, wouldnt it be possible to prove (or rather disprove) that you leaked to a slack channel full of journalists? 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! Then, when someone particularly notable would enter our database, we would get a reminder email not naming names but reminding us that no matter how interesting the information is, its private and not ok to share. (Most companies that use these kinds of scanners dont let employees know. I have personally learned that if you never want coworkers to find out something embarrassing or private about you, never ever tell them. But if you act that way about a mistake at a previous job, I think people might worry about the same behavior in the future. Messages like this can simply be ignored and deleted. Thats when it gets tricky. A person who is aware of a breach is required to report it. This was also my thought. I know that I messed up and I shouldnt have told anyone; in a moment of weakness I texted one of my best friends. LW, we are all human. Well, this is both unkind and off-base. This is a great point LW. Is anyone else dying to know what the information was? Of course, it wasnt your mistake and youre under no legal obligation to do anything at all. as a manager, should I not wear a childless shirt in my off-hours? Then both OP and Coworker could be out of a job. Im sure he knew about things that he would have liked to talk about, and my dad can talk about anything to anyone at great length. Your former job will probably only verify your employment unless you broke a governmental regulation. (Im not from the US, and not in government) If I were in OPs place, I would also be upset and feel betrayed. LW is undisciplined and has a big mouth. Another engineer girl here, at a place where people have been fired for leaks and it hits the news when it happens: theres a warning during New Hire Orientation, and between that and our reputation, youre expected to know it. OP needs to learn the art of discernment. Best of luck with your search. Even if they knew she used Slack to talk to journalists in general, its a massive enough leap from I told a friend via text that Im side-eyeing the coworker and HR a little. Share information about a Harry Potter book before it being officially released? Or if the coworker only decided afterwards this couldnt be kept in the dark, call her and tell her this. Equally, when we had a client who does the same job role as someone I know, I had to completely embargo that piece of information in my head, because I know that its a small field and my friend might recognise the detail I thought was vague enough to be anonymous. Check out this article on that HERE. Sometimes I see stuff that is cool to nerds of that particular field, but 95% of my Secret Information from clients is not even interesting to them. I hope you mean it when you say you understand the magnitude of this mistake and why you were fired for it. You can bet Id be gone with no second chance despite my almost-20-years and ton of good work. One of the things your field requires is to be able to think and act dispassionately about the information you have custody over. My only other advice is to consider if there were any conversations on slack that were inappropriate. I remind people about once a year that not only can I not look up their medical info on my own, I cant look it up even if they ask me to, and I get in even more trouble if I look up my own medical info. But the other person she spoke to, her coworker, told others, and somehow that message (of who and how she leaked it) got twisted into something much worse. How do I make amends and go about apologizing to former manager(s) after being dismissed for gross misconduct? It could be that she did (and I think no employer should ever fire anyone without hearing their version of the story) but the employer still thought its bad enough that they need to fire OP. 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. 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. 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. Yes, you can get fired for opening a phishing email. 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. While irritating, email from mass marketing lists dont require a response and you probably wouldnt get an answer anyway. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has also issued a written rebuke to Christopher Gossage, of Russells solicitors, who confided to his wifes best friend that Robert Galbraith, author of The Cuckoos Calling, was really one of the most famous and wealthy authors in the world. She screwed up, and they fired her because thats what she deserved. This technique requires extra steps, but it . Like, how did HR and OPs boss come to the conclusion that this information was spread through Slack (!) it really should be I made a foolish mistake, Its more a case of I broke the rules bigtime and expected someone else to cover up for me.. It can take down evil people who mean to do others harm. My code is GPL licensed, can I issue a license to have my code be distributed in a specific MIT licensed project? 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. That doesnt seem to be you, which is a great sign. It doesnt matter if theyd trust this person with their firstborn child. Thats a horrendously burdensome thing to ask! I had the same thoughtthat was very unwise. Absolutely this. YOU know you wouldnt do it again, but nobody else can really know that. Ive been thinking a lot about apologies in general lately, and one of the most thought-provoking pieces of advice Ive seen is to always err on the side of assuming that whatever you did was a bigger deal than you think.

Urbana High School Track Public Hours, Some Kind Of Wonderful Actress Dies, 55 Plus Communities In Bowie, Md, Betty Benitez Manila Film Center, Articles C