REAL LIFE NEWS: THE DANGERS OF TECHNOLOGY BEING TOO HELPFUL
by Hazed
The Bank of England has just issued a new edict to its staff. Their email system must disable the autocomplete function when typing email addresses. Henceforth, they will have to be typed out in full.
The reason for this drastic new rule is because last month someone at the bank accidentally emailed a top secret document detailing the bank’s contingency plan for the event of the country leaving the European Union, to the Guardian newspaper.
Whoops!
The secret email included instructions about how to keep the plans secret, as well as giving details of how to fend off enquiries from the press. Shame it didn’t include a warning about paying attention to the email address you were sending it to!
Autocomplete is terribly convenient; it means you don’t have to remember people’s email addresses in full. But it also makes it so easy to get things wrong.
At work, I have three Toms in my contact list: one who sits next to me in the office, one who used to work for the company but has now left, and one who is an outside person I deal with on a regular basis. I am constantly sending emails to the wrong Tom because I fail to pay attention to how my email program has autocompleted the address. No harm done for me; I don’t deal with top secret information, so it’s just a minor inconvenience.
This is yet another example of how technology that was supposed to make life easier for us introduces a whole new set of problems.
But now that the BoE has turned off autocomplete, and staff have to laboriously type out email addresses in full, surely there’s the risk they will type something wrong and send their highly confidential messages to a completely different person – johnsmith47 instead of johnsmith46!
I don’t think it would be possible to implement a fool-proof system in any case – after all, the universe just keeps on making bigger fools.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/22/secret-bank-of-england-taskforce-investigates-financial-fallout-brexit
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2015/jun/15/autocomplete-emails-undo-bank-of-england-right-to-ban
