<nettime> Fired for mailinglist submission

[Mikael Pawlo <mikael@pawlo.com>]

A Swedish employee was fired today for participating in an online debate.

One of the most popular Swedish Internet industry mailinglists is Trafik,
run by Stefan Hallgren, Marina Walstrom and Christopher Arnold. Yesterday
afternoon, one of the members of Trafik submitted a link to the list, not
an uncommon feature. If you decided to follow the link, you would receive
the entire memberlist of top ten Swedish Internet web site Everyday.com,
including personal data on every member. Quite a few downloaded the
database and the information regarding the total lack of security on
Everyday.com quickly reached the media. This spurred a discussion, since
the list rules of Trafik are very specific regarding non-disclosure of
ongoing discussions and submissions. Hence, I'm not a member of Trafik.

Also, Everyday.com, suffering from the leakage, decided to hunt the
informers down by infiltration of Trafik. It is not clear if the
infiltration started as a direct effect of the leakage, or if the company
has had lurking participants on the list before. The company sent
complaints and information regarding intruders to their respective ISP
and asked the ISPs to reveal the intruders true identity and phone number 
etcetera.

One of the employees of a sister company to Everyday.com,
Noname4us, participated in the discussion regarding the behaviour of
Everyday.com. As a direct result of his participation he was fired. I'm
not sure on what grounds he was fired, since Swedish labour law is pretty
strict when it comes to lay-offs. However, the employer might have
argued that the employee was in breach of the rules of loyalty towards
the employer.

Related links:
http://www.noname4us.se/
http://www.everyday.com/

Original database link:
http://auctions.everyday.com/edaydump/

Internetworld Sweden on the distribution of personal data:
http://nyheter.idg.se/display.asp?ID=010319-IW1

Best regards,

Mikael Pawlo
Stockholm, Sweden


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