Looking for a council house in Sheffield City? Meet your fellow tenants An e-tempest is brewing in the beautiful northern metropolis of Sheffield after a City Council staffer forgot to BCC locals due to renew their Housing Register status. It was a mere 10 minutes later, displaying a laudable commitment to remediating the leak, that the council followed up the email seeking "to recall the message …
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Shouldn't the council have notified the ICO themselves?
...Like the Register did when they did exactly the same thing? *innocent whistle*
Not something I've ever done; but I'm pretty sure that's largely due to regular stories about other people doing it, so I look at CC fields with extreme suspicion.
It's easy for those of us with long experience of using computers and email to mock bureaucrats who make blunders like this. However, the fact that this kind of blunder is easy and common does raise the question of whether IT could actually do something about it. It would be easy for mail programs to refuse to send emails with more than a (configurable) handful of addresses in the To: and CC: lines, at least without querying the use.
Abbreviation will be the death of me.
Possibly sometime late in 2055, when flying my flying car, I press the AES** instead of the AAS** button. As no doubt they will be right next to each other, and easily distinguished by 2 different shades of burgundy.
*Automatic Ejector Seat
**Automatic Approach System.
How many levels of·"Are you sure?" do you propose.
Are you sure?
Are your really sure?
Are you really, really sure you're really sure.
Then there could always be a "Just send the effing mail" override button.
Doesn't matter how many levels of protection you put in, it will still happen.
No, the fault of HR. It's all too simple to assume that everyone they recruit has been trained in the basics by someone else. Their induction procedures should cover the basics of data protection including misuse of cc: and make breaches a disciplinary matter. But given the fact that in this case someone then sent out an attempt to recall and in doing so did exactly the same thing makes you wonder about the way they go about recruiting in the first place.
>makes you wonder about the way they go about recruiting in the first place
Same as everywhere else these days.
Now then candidate A what renumeration do you expect?
A: Oh, at lest 40,0000
Same question to B
B: I'll be happy with a bag of peanuts and maybe you could throw me the odd bone from time to time.
One might wonder, with all the wonderful things one hears about this interweb thingie, that major providers of email clients don't have a group policy which *forbids* CC? Or at a minimum, forbids CC with (as suggested elsewhere in the thread) more than some small minimum of entries.
"It's all too simple to assume that everyone they recruit has been trained in the basics by someone else."
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the prime reason for the vast majority of calls to the helldesk.
As for restricting the number of recipients in the To: and/or CC: fields, sorry, that's just not on. How else will HR be able to tell the entire company about who's leaving and who's joining the HR department? (Not that anyone cares about all the other employees leaving or starting who never get a company wide hello or goodbye)
Having dealt with both Sheffield City Council (as it's where I live) and Sheffield Property Shop (on behalf of someone else), I can tell you now, from personal experience, just what a bunch of incompetents the entire shower is.
And quite how SPS have managed to get away with that privacy policy is absolutely beyond me.
A spokesperson from Sheffield City Council said: “... We noticed immediately and recalled the email and alerted data protection officers."
The very first lesson in school ICT, and in all these IT literacy courses should be "YOU CAN'T RECALL AN EXTERNAL EMAIL!"
I bet they feel so proud they recalled it immediately...
Shame...
A spokesperson from Sheffield City Council said: “... We noticed immediately and recalled the email and alerted data protection officers."
Just replace the word "recalled the email" with "highlighted our mistake to everyone to make sure they had noticed that we had made a serious boo boo" in every occasion that you see it.
Sure you can... much like they used to recall faxes: "put it in an envelope and send it back to us". Only with email all you have to do is hit "reply" and it goes back to them
Ok.. most manglement or PR types that say they "recalled" the email are idiots. They probably fall for the Amish Virus every time also.
This is why I've spent quite a bit of time this week developing an intranet app for my HR dept to send email to all staff members' *personal* email rather than giving them a list of contacts (we have a lot of non-office based staff). Maybe not this week, and maybe not next, but one week, someone would have sent to the To or CC field. With a bit of effort, that is now impossible...*
*I hope. I've tested and tested and tested...
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"The Register does not know if the residents have begun emailing each other using the "reply-to-all" function"
Is the Pope Catholic?
Every time we had a reply-to-all storm at a former employer you could look forward to a half-day of r-t-a requests to not reply to all, mixed in with requests to "delete me from this list" even, or perhaps especially, for emails that didn't originate from a list server, all enlivened with sarky comments on the internal newsgroups.
Made me wish for Google Wave. Apparently I was the only one.
Sometimes it's the fault of the hardware. A couple of times I've moved my mouse towards a button and I've bumped into the side of the keyboard causing my finger to press down, activating whatever button the pointer happens to be over at that point.
A sensible option would be to make the Reply All or Send To Group functions forcibly put the recipents addresses in the BCC list.
But even if you accidentally hit "Reply All", you need to then compose and hit send before it becomes an irreversible act. I hit "Reply All" accidentally loads of times at work, I then look at the massive list of names it's going to, I call myself a twat, hit cancel.
And in the original Sheffield case, there's no way this is a bumping of the mouse, or a misplaced tap. This is doing it wrong and not checking before sending.
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