Be careful what you put in a work email

When I'm getting on with the day to day business of work, I just want to get things done. I'm not a politician, I don't stop to think about how my daily activities might look, should they make it to the public domain. I daresay, even politicians forget this too, judging from the WhatsApp, Signal and other leaks from messaging apps that see the light of day, every now and again.

I started thinking about this when I came across the Enron Corpus, which Wikipedia defines as "a database of over 600,000 emails written by 158 employees of the Enron Corporation in the years leading up to the company's collapse in December 2001." The database was generated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) during its subsequent investigation, from the from Enron email servers.

As Wikipedia goes on to explain, this corpus is important because it is:

valued as one of the few publicly available mass collections of real emails easily available for study; such collections are typically bound by numerous privacy and legal restrictions which render them prohibitively difficult to access, such as non-disclosure agreements and data sanitization.

I find we're biased to presume the permanence and continuity of established companies, as well as some seemingly intractable states of affairs, which lulls one into a false sense that they will endure forever. However, as we know, everything changes. Worse than having to endure the loss of your workplace closing, is realising that your email communications will become the subject of studies, long after the company ceased to exist. This is a prolonged and painful invasion of privacy that is difficult to imagine, and ward against, during a quotidian workday.

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