For most employees, it is relatively easy to send
information from the employer's network to a private digital
environment, such as personal e-mail or cloud storage.
The motive may be innocent — for example, because the
employee wants to work from home but does not have access to the
employer's digital environment there – or it may be for
other, less innocent motives. In any case, when company information
leaves the employer's digital environment without permission,
this can have harmful consequences.
Summary dismissal
In a recent case in the Netherlands, an employee was rightly
summarily dismissed because he sent 791 documents from his
employer's server to his personal Dropbox account, shortly
after he was told that his fixed-term employment contract would not
be extended. The employer had an IT policy that stated (among other
things) that employees may not make copies of the employer's
data or store information from the employer on personal
locations.
