Embarrassing leak on Twitter for Leek United Building Society
Most weekday mornings Twitter is busy with people commenting on their particular take on that day's rat race. Mostly benign, it does contain the odd nugget and today offered a rich vein after someone spotted an apparent building society executive with papers spread out for all to see!
Honestly, we may be bored with stories of spies leaving their laptops on trains, but I don't think we've ever had then spreading out photographs of their favourite safe house. Yet clearly confidentail papers relating to the Staffordshire-based Leek Building Society were spread out for all to see this morning.
The tale unfolds on the 0800 Virgin train from London Euston to Manchester Picadilly in Coach D and the man exposing a bit too much is in seat 49, next to the window and is pictured here. Before him he has papers relating to a board meeting of Staffordshire based Leek Building Society. This prompts rather surprised Twitter @ReadingGirl, also known to her friends as Kate Gee, to tweet:
I'm sat opposite someone who so definitely should be hiding his papers. Should I leak the contents on Twitter?
After being retweeted- or republished - and encouraged to reveal more she comments further:
@partroot @robwhistler You are very naughty! It's a board meeting about a certain building society's liquidity.
A flurry of replies encourage her to do so, but she doesn't actually reveal any of the figures related to liquidity that she can see, but she did snap this photo of the man whose papers she and others could plainly see and the one of his folder used above and left unattended during the journey.
When I said that I would blog about this she revealed the name of the building society and the cat was out of the leather folder.
She also tweeted:
@Nigel_Morgan I couldn't believe how careless he was. I feel sorry for their borrowers as this was a blatant breach of confidentiality.
@Nigel_Morgan Please blog away, I'm happy for #leekbuildingsociety to be named & shamed!
Now, @ReadingGirl has a modest 167 followers, but the conversation brought in many hundreds more and combined tweets from our accounts pushed it out to over 10,000 people. She also created a hashtag for the society, which is a clickable search tool that will render all of the tweets using that tag.
Then there is this blog, which in itself will attract tweets, comments on Facebook and LinkedIn. In terms of search engine optimisation this story and the social media comments will exist long after today - and that assumes no traditional media pick it up. If they do it becomes far more damaging still.
It might be the man pictured has nothing to do with Leek United Building Society, but that would beg the question why he had such confidentail papers? Perhaps he is a shareholder? Whatever the explanation for why he had the papers, clearly letting others see them has consequences and represents a careless breach of confidentiality.
What lesson? Well in a world of camera phones and social media, nowhere is quite as private as it once was. The Leek United Building Society should be grateful that @ReadingGirl was not inclined to tweet the indiscretion and not the data.