“Want to find a partner via a dating website? Feel tempted to share a complex work related issue with colleagues? Or even spontaneously spill about your hangover on social media? Any of these could cost you your reputation and even your career,” Bernadette John writes for The Telegraph.
“The explosive growth of personal technology, from smart phones and tablets to file sharing and social media, plus the adoption of the same technology for professional purposes has created a dangerous new world where privacy, reputations and even careers are increasingly at risk,” John writes. “Medical negligence lawyers in the US now routinely request the clinicians’s tablet and mobile phone records in all medical negligence cases because the potential for a clinician to be distracted during surgery by the digital communications, from social media to email, is a recognised risk.”
“As the Lead for Digital Professionalism and Social Media at King’s College London, I have yet to witness a clinician using their phone during surgery, but am aware of enough cases where things have gone wrong to believe that all companies need to introduce specific training and policies in digital professionalism to protect customers, staff and the business itself,” John writes. “The biggest issues I am coping with now are less to do with what people say and share consciously, but more to do with the consequences of private lives becoming public via lack of understanding of how apps and programmes can make public things that people believe are private. This is because additional information is invisibly embedded in almost everything we share.”
Read more in the full article here.