A Matter of Privacy

A few of the ladies that work in my office recently discovered that if they "Googled" their name, their contact information came up - often times at the top of the search. The information provided includes their name, email address, title, and direct phone number at our office. Add to it that we also display our address (the part I have no trouble with), and you have enough information to be able to harass or stalk the person from their work, then ultimately follow them home.

Two of the ladies at work have had previous encounters with a stalker, that I know of. I know one of them actually has a restraining order against her ex, who has stalked her in the past. So having their information so easily found on the web doesn't seem right.

When I first learned about management wanting to put this information on the web site, I spoke up and voiced my concern regarding privacy. At the time, I didn't even know about the stalker incidents of those 2 ladies. My pleads were ultimately ignored and we've since kept an accurate and up-to-date list of all staff members on our web site. Did I fail to mention that this was all done without notifying any of the staff?

It wasn't until the last week or two that I've been asked about why we had this information publicly available on our site by 3 of our staff members. I help maintain our site, so it wasn't unusual for them to ask me about it. Then again today, I heard of another incident where a staff member was contacted by somebody in an odd circumstance (though I don't have any of the details) by use of the information found on our web site.

To be honest, I don't see why we need this information on our web site. Most of the staff doesn't interact with the public. In fact we've been urged not to unless it is in direct relation to our position. This is to make sure that any public information is handled properly and our messaging is consistent. Some staff need to be contacted directly for various duties and functions, but the majority don't.

So today I decided to send an email out to the 5 ladies that have either voiced concern over this issue or have had situations in their lives where this might be a concern. I simply suggested that they contact our HR department and ask them to remove their name from the web site list. Apparently some of them already have and I just found out that I'm going to get "talked to" about sending this email. To me it seems like I'm going to get my ass chewed out for trying to be a nice guy and keeping an eye out for staff members. Isn't that what HR is supposed to be doing?

I'll post an update about what happens from here. Wish me luck.

This entry was made possible by Google and a concerned IT guy.