Moral of the story is that the cover up is what gets you not the crime (hello Nixon). Also, taking other people’s mailing lists and pasting them into outlook is NOT clever, smart or grown up… it is ILLEGAL and UNETHICAL. Finally, wise bosses know that people make mistakes but would much rather they follow the usage policies and guidelines that they’ve had written up so that everyone (silly person, wise boss and data subject) are protected.

My personal hope is that Mr Burns is NOT fired… he was new, naive and made a stooooopid error of judgement. I do hope his story becomes part of the corporate culture in Monster (”did you get that mailing list from a legit source? It’s important – remember what happened to Burnsy back in 2007. He was left looking like a twit on the Internet and had to be bailed out…”).

As for Pedro… anonymity on the Internet is a relative myth..

Just my tuppenceworth but good blog all the same.

The short story is that some newbie at Monster sent out a bunch of emails trying to impress his boss. When tackled by Michele Neylon about this he became a bit embarrassed, flustered and defensive, probably hoping the ‘issue’ would go away.

Essentially he made a mistake and then became defensive about it – who can honestly say they have never done that?

Plus we aren’t privy to the contents of the telephone conversation between John Burns and Michele which led to the later blog entry. Undoubtedly M was really nice to him on the phone and not at all antagonistic but he just refused to apologize. I mean that’s how these type of phone conversations usually pan out, right?

Congratulations to Michele and Tom for humiliating this guy and possibly costing him his job. I’d recommend using a better spam filter and/or learning to use the delete button when it comes to your email.

I’ve nothing to do with the guy btw, I just caught it on digg and after listening to his voicemail got annoyed enough leave this comment. Hmmm, misdirected outrage and too much time on my hands, maybe I should start a blog too?

I don’t think that there’s any problems putting up the recording – he knew it was being recorded since it was preceeded with a leave a message after the beep message (and then a beep)

He messed up, but he should have learned when to stop digging.

For the apparent lack of an official reply from Monster (who I’m sure won’t be worried about how John Burns comes out of this) I’d guess that they haven’t heard about it….yet.

Had I published an entire email, there is an outside chance of being in breach of copyright, but there is no data protection implications there.

Personally, I think you should report him and let the law take its course. However, by publishing the material its probable that you have also violated the act.

John

Okay, I wasn’t going to blog about this, as I thought there was enough coverage on it already.But Grandad just came up with this gem, which is well worth sharing…….

Instead, he went on the attack, all guns blazing so he can hardly complain now that we fired back.

As for publishing the voicemail, how is publishing the voicemail different from publishing his emails? They are both simply electronic communications.

He might be an ordinary Joe Soap who doesn’t have a clue about email, but instead of trying to learn from his mistake, he went on the defensive. A simple apology would have nipped all this in the bud!

I’m not sure if I agree with putting up the voicemail, however it did make for a good laugh.