DPO Stories #1 - Hyves digging into personal messages

THE POWER OF STORIES

Stories are of all times, but lately organisational behaviorists and marketers have a renewed interest in them with books like Story Wars and Made to Stick and startups like story.me and GoAnimate. DPOs have stories as well of their own experience or heared in there community. And they should use them to engage the organisation, at least to raise awareness, questions and/or discussions. Note that we keep some obscurity and that any reference to a name or situation you may know is likely to be based on coincidence. :-) 
(This intro will move downward in the next post of this series.)

ONCE UPON A TIME...

Hyves is a social network that is strong in the Netherlands and up until 2012 gave facebook some resistance in that country. At some point quite a number of renouned Dutchmen are on Hyves, especially politicians as the 2006 elections are coming up. One of them is Wouter Bos, a candidate for prime minister of the Netherlands.

One night Wouter Glaser, the PR guy for Wouter Bos, calls Raymond Spanjar, the CEO of Hyves, still a startup at the time.

"Raymond, you HAVE to help me!" You can hear the fear in his voice. "I have accidentally sent a message to a girl I met in a bar last weekend via the account of Wouter Bos."

Wouter Glaser handles the Hyves account private mailbox of Wouter Bos, as a lead of a team to which he flips questions that need more research. That way he keeps close to the heartbeat of the voters. That evening he had the account of Wouter Bos open on one screen, but... also on another screen his own email in which he was a.o. corresponding with a hot girl. As he hit the "send" button, his heart skipped a beat. He saw the profile picture of Wouter Bos.

"Crap!"

He realised that he had sent his pick-up lines ("Let's have a drink.")... via the account of Wouter Bos... coindicentally to a blond 25-ish cute female voter from Amsterdam. And as the message is signed by "Wouter" the mistake is not clear in itself.

What if the media would get a hold of a screenshot of that email?

"Can you guys delete that message?"

Raymond doesn't know how to do that, so he calls his CTO, Koen. A real techie Koen sleeps with his phone and his computer near his pillow. Via a remote login Koen can delete the content of the message. The girl will see that there was a message from Wouter Bos, but what it said remains unknown.

(source: Raymond Spanjar, Hyves, p. 153 - Dutch - freely downloadable here)

COMMENT

Hard to tell if the story is not a bit pollished to avoid a top politician getting into trouble. But that is irrelevant for the main dilemma: was it and is it ever justified as a social network platform provider to go into the personal messages of the users?

The story doesn't really play out the dilemma for the CEO and the CTO of Hyves. But they should have been worried for their integrity... and their reputation should it have come out. Moreover going into the communication between third parties is quite often a criminal offense. Shouldn't they just have kept out of the mess? Theoretically, very likely the answer is yes. It is not because something is technically possible, that you should do it.

However, in practice they did not. And nothing came of it. And that happens as well. Sometimes the risk doesn't materialise, and in such a case a DPO is often looked at as the boy who cried wolf.

Obviously there is also the moral of the story for email / social media users: before you send, do not only check the content and who you send it to - tons of stories about that -, but also which account you are working in.

CALL TO ACTION

Do you have any good stories? Can you (pseudonomised) share them? (If so, please, do.)