VS employee in leak claim

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/ap ... ht-details

[Pete]

Very bad news for VS. The employee in question has apparently resigned, but I'm of the opinion they need to publicly reassure passengers that there's a very large disincentive for staff tempted by paps, so this won't happen again, eg, legal action.

I see that the relevelations date to flights taken in 2010 but have only recently been uncovered.

I can imagine the Information Commissioner taking an interest in this matter - check to see what VS is doing to (a) investigate what happened and (b) put in place systems to try and prevent it in future

[Pete]

Prevention can only be making the risk greater than the reward. People are greedy, but their sense of self-preservation has a ceiling limit.

I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second here and say that in fairness to VS, they probably have their staff sign confidentiality agreements and beyond tapping phone lines, hacking emails and generally keeping a Big Brother-like eye on all of them, they really can't control each one.

That said, one would expect better behaviour from a senior crew member. She might have just looked at it as an easy way of making a little extra and not thought about the fact that she was in breach of her contractual obligations.

I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second here and say that in fairness to VS, they probably have their staff sign confidentiality agreements and beyond tapping phone lines, hacking emails and generally keeping a Big Brother-like eye on all of them, they really can't control each one.

That said, one would expect better behaviour from a senior crew member. She might have just looked at it as an easy way of making a little extra and not thought about the fact that she was in breach of her contractual obligations.

There's nothing to suggest it was a crew member, it is more likely to be an office based staff member the Crew are usually only told about celebrities on their individual flights as they come up not every flight in advance that they carry. Crew get enough stick at times on here.

I think this is overplayed, in any organization of thousands of people there are bound to be the odd bad apples. It could and probably does happen in every large airline, and in this instance (she) the person was caught, and has suffered consequences. Further consequences as Pete says may follows, that tends to act as sufficient disincentive for others not to follow the same path.

The flight codes given in the correspondence – such as VS7 for Heathrow to JFK flights – also match information published on Virgin Atlantic's website

That was well researched... not!

Surely there is a public interest defence here?i I would want to know if any of that lot were the flight so I could rebook.

[mitchja]

This is a very difficult problem to prevent in many industries these days.

The same thing happened at T Mobile UK a few years ago where a call centre agent decided to take it upon themselves to gather and sell T-Mobile customer information to a third party.

[Darren Wheeler]

If an individual has access to certain information needed to do their job, there's not a lot a company can do if that individual takes it upon themselves to misuse the data. You can put all sorts of checks and balances in place but there has to be a balance between security and ease of access.

What is important is a clear and accurate audit trail on who accessed what data, when and why, with random checks to ensure compliance.


Mind you, how many calls from publicists coincided with these trips too?

Leaking (frequently publicity hungry) celebutard's travel plans is one thing - the queen's grand daughter's quite another:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... lans-email

The biggest concern to VS is presumably the possibility of it being boycotted by rich celebrities who pay a lot of money for their seats. VS has traditionally been seen as more showbiz than the more business-oriented BA or AA, so this could be very damaging commercially.

Im gutted. I took a flight in 2010 and im sure i was "papped"
Do you think ill get a free upgrade

[Pete]

Im gutted. I took a flight in 2010 and im sure i was "papped"
Do you think ill get a free upgrade

Only if you tell that picture agency who you are

I finally saw the list of the 70 'top celebrities' whose flight details were supposely leaked.

They were certainly not all 'top' by any stretch of the imagination.

Not that excuses the selling of the details though but the Guardian was certainly over-egging the importance of the celebs involved.

Also somewhat ironic to have a large pic of one of the celebs who had obviously been papped when the main point of the article is complaining is breach of privacy.