Respect the Privacy of Others. Assume that You Have None.

One of the professional organizations I belong to sponsors several incredibly helpful listserves where members can send messages to everyone who has signed up and ask questions they need help with, offer technical expertise, request a reference for a particular product or vendor or air whatever else they have on their mind. It’s a great resource and a wonderful example of how people from across the country and around the world can come together to as an online community. Unfortunately, online communities aren’t immune to the same kinds of problems that we see in other groups. Though these listserves specifically exclude vendors from joining and members are frequently reminded that all that all conversations are confidential and should not be shared with anyone else without permission, every so often it seems that we have to go through a blowup when it becomes clear that the vendors have been keeping up with our discussions.

It happens like this; I send out a message asking if anyone has been having trouble with the XYZ Corporation’s doohickeys and mention that I haven’t had much luck with their customer support, either. Lo and behold, I almost immediately get a call from my XYZ representative, who I haven’t heard from in years but insists the call is purely part of their normal program of keeping in touch with clients. I call the listserve administrator, who assures me that there are no vendors on the group list, so one of my fellow members had to have forwarded my message along. Maybe they thought they were doing me a favor. Maybe they have a close relationship with someone at XYZ Corp. But this is exactly the kind of thing that you should never do without permission and why you need to assume that your email exchanges are never private. A big part of the problem is that you may have a very different idea of what information is appropriate to share than the original sender of the message. And you might not even have enough information to know what’s appropriate to forward along and what’s not. I’ve been surprised more than once to find that people I really like are close friends with people I can barely tolerate and been immensely relieved that I haven’t bad-mouthed one to the other. Imagine if you’ve put those feelings down in writing….

The wise thing to do is to always ask permission before forwarding along someone else’s message. If you can’t ask for permission, delete anything that the third party doesn’t need to see from the original message, even if you think it’s innocuous. That’s right, you can edit someone else’s message and forward it along—which is another reason to be wary of email. Because you can’t rely on stopping these sorts of leaks, don’t put anything in email you don’t want other people to see, whether it’s racy vacation pictures, financial information or criticism of someone else. You need to assume that someone may violate your trust and privacy, whether they intend to or just don’t know any better.