… surely no harm done. 🤔
It can be easy to make an error when you have a million and one things on your mind.
But some of those errors can have serious repercussions.
I heard about John, an HR manager.
One day, he had to send an important email to his team.
But he made a simple mistake.
He was hurrying to get the email sent and added everyone’s email addresses in the “To” field.
If John had realised what he had done, he probably would have thought it didn’t matter, but the consequences could have been serious.
Soon after hitting “Send,” John started receiving messages from his colleagues.
They were upset because their personal email addresses were visible to everyone on the list.
John was mortified.
Reviewing what he had done, John realised that he had broken data privacy rules (in the UK, it’s called PECR)
He should have used the “Bcc” field to prevent others from seeing all the email addresses.
As this was an internal email, the consequences were just some miffed colleagues, but if this had been an external email, it could have been far worse, maybe even a fine.
This incident sparked a review of John’s company’s data privacy policies and procedures and the introduction of data training for all employees, so this would not happen again in the future.
Luckily the outcome of this data breach was not serious, but it can be easy to forget small rules when dealing with the different aspects of your business.
As the Marketing Expert, I can help make sure these small mistakes are not made.