Technological Blunders

Technology may bring the world to your fingertips, but it can leave dangerous fingerprints behind.

Earlier this week Fabrice Tourre a Bonds Trader for Goldman Sachs testified before Congress on his role in the mortgage meltdown. But it’s his pile of leaked emails that might have him more concerned. Private emails to his French girlfriend and emails where he admitted to not understanding the implications of the trades he was making. But he isn’t the first victim of email blunder and he won’t be the last.

According to a 2006 study 210 billion emails are sent each day and emails in error are sent 42 times a minute. Dennis Brown is a legal expert in employment practices in the Bay Area and says emails have the permanence of a letter and casualness of a conversation, which is a dangerous conversation. Brown says people need to learn what they put in an email is forever and can come back to haunt them. And it doesn’t stop there. As we learned from Tiger Woods all technical exchanges such as text messages and voice mails can always find their way into the public eye. Cyber space is big but it can’t hold all our secrets.