Not too long ago, we wrote about Tesla Motors’ CEO’s efforts to ferret out the leaks in his organization and how he was sabotaged by his GC.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently liked the idea, if not the execution. Eagle-eyed editors at Valleywag spotted typos in Zuckerberg’s memo announcing CFO Gideon Yu’s departure. Turns out Zuck had distributed a whole slew of subtly different versions of the document.
As Valleywag notes,
Why bother sending employees individual copies of a mass email with subtle changes throughout? There’s only one reason to bother: Using the changes as tell-tale clues to identify whose copy got forwarded. … Each of those changes can, in theory, serve as an identifier; assemble a series of unique identifiers, and it’s possible to trace a particular version of an email to a particular employee.
Hopefully new Facebook privacy boss Tim Sparapani will do a better job on these missions in the future.
Be careful with those layoff memoranda. We’ll be happy to paraphrase or restate any tips, so keep them coming. (And we’ll also run blacklines if we get multiple sources)
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