To CC or BCC — In Job Searches, There's Little Question; Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/17/10

Don Troop, Chronicle of Higher Education; To CC or BCC — In Job Searches, There's Little Question:

"Career-minded academics know there are certain key moments to go on the job market: Straight out of grad school. Immediately after publishing a talked-about book. And, as a safety net, the year that one goes up for tenure. Regardless of when they do it, most job seekers expect their flirtations to stay more or less private—at least until the campus visit.

So the apology was swift and to the point last month after a new history-department employee at the Johns Hopkins University accidentally identified 106 job applicants to one another in a mortifying mass-­e-mail blunder.

William Rowe, the history-department chairman, says he told the outed academics in his bcc'd message that a clerical error was to blame, "and we apologize for any embarrassment we may have caused you."

Three days after Mr. Rowe's mea culpa, the University of South Carolina similarly identified 46 applicants who had responded to an advertisement for "multiple tenure-track positions" in the School of Library and Information Science. The mass e-mail message invited applicants to sign up for one of 20 interview slots at the annual conference of Alise, the Association for Library and Information Science Education, which took place last week in Boston.

This time, however, the apology never came.

Samantha Hastings, director of South Carolina's library school, says that the group message, with addresses visible, was deliberate and was part of "an experiment" to efficiently schedule interviews in a limited time. "We had determined that everyone that we contacted had given us permission to use their names," she says. "The step prior to that mass e-mail was that, 'We're going to send a mass e-mail. Are you all right with that?'"

As it turned out, some were not all right with it, and none of the roughly half-dozen applicants who responded to an e-mail inquiry from The Chronicle remembered being asked...

Privacy breaches can also have legal implications, though no one interviewed for this article could recall an instance in which a college was penalized for revealing a candidate's name. Nonetheless, Mr. Rowe says, the e-mail incident at Johns Hopkins raised the antennae of the university's legal department."

http://chronicle.com/article/To-CC-or-BCC-In-Job/63543/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en