If a company has confidential information in the computer?

Question

and any employee can access it, should the employee get in trouble for going into it? It's in the U: drive under a person's name file. It doesn't say confidential or anything. The company found out he went into it and now they are trying to fire him. But isn't it the companies fault for not locking it?

Answer 1

He could have a wrongful dismissal case if he wasn't told that he couldn't access this information.

Answer 2

No, it's his fault for accessing something that was none of his business, especially if the file was named after a specific person's name (such as a HR manager's first name, etc.).

Just because there is access doesn't mean you have to look. If the accountant had $500 sitting on his desk, is it ok to pick it up to show someone without stealing it? It's how it looks and the basic trust put on employees.

The company should have locked it out, but aren't looking at it like that.

Answer 3

No, the employee likely should not have been going in there affirmatively looking at the data, whether it was locked or not.

If a store at night forgets to lock up the door and somebody comes by, finds the door open and proceeds to take stuff from the store, that is still a theft.

The key here is that you accessed the data improperly. It doesn't matter how or to what extent the company tried to prevent it.

If it is against company guidelines, then they can take action and probably should.

Answer 4

Patrick is right, you should make sure your old hard drive is "wiped" with one of several programs that writes and re-writes over the entire drive multiple times so that fragmented data cannot be retrieved. (that's after you recover what you want, of course) Assuming you have an ethernet port on the old Compaq, get a crossover cable from RadioShack or your local computer geek, hook the two computers up, enable file sharing on your Compaq (open windows explorer and right click on your C: drive, select "sharing" and make sure it's enabled. then browse there from your laptop, cut and paste the files you want. If you want to get technical, a crossover cable connects pins 1,2,3 & 6 to 3,6,1 & 2, so you could make your own if you felt inclined. You could consider getting your USB port working, which would let you use it to copy the files onto a thumb drive, but then you'd have to get a thumb drive somewhere, and as cool as they are, it's going to be slightly more expensive than a crossover cable. (if you can justify it, or get one for Christmas, go for it :) ) Go on Ebay and look for Flash Drive's to get an idea. Good luck! Mike

Answer 5

If someone is told not to do something, or there is a written policy against doing something and the employee does it anyways that is a form of insubordination. Insubordination should be dealt with by disciplinary action (being "written up"). Depending upon the gravity of the offense / history of issues the person could/should be terminated. The company is not acting in their own best interest by leaving the file unlocked and they should rectify that immediately.