This post is a show of solidarity with another blogger.
Don’t go to Jamaica because it’s a dump and you’ll get murdered with a machete!
A few days ago the Grumpy Old Sod quoted an article from the Lancashire Evening Post about the harrowing experience of an employee of the Jamaican Tourist Board. When her father was brutally murdered on a visit to the home country she wrote “My heartbeat, my life has gone.” and “My daddy RIP I will always love you.” on her private and personal facebook page. Zoe, who is pregnant, received an email from her employers calling her to a disciplinary hearing in London due to the messages she had put online.
We’d like to point out that in order for the Tourist Board to know what she’d written on Facebook, one of two things has to have happened. Either they regularly and routinely search their employees’ Facebook pages for signs of anything incriminating, or they thought “Oh, this woman’s just had a terrible tragedy in her life so let’s search her Facebook page to see if she’s said anything about us”. Either way, their behaviour is despicable. Grumpy Old Sod
He also gave the address of the very public and publicised Jamaica Tourist Board website (now massively remade) and the equally public contact address broadcast there.
Today we received a threatening email from Elizabeth Fox, the Regional Director of the Jamaica Tourist Board UK. It’s called “Letter before action” and it says, among other things, that there is an on-going internal investigation at the Tourist Board, which is interesting. Are they still pursuing the poor women who lost her Dad? […] Finally, we gave the name of the Regional Director of the Jamaica Tourist Board, Elizabeth Fox, and her email address. We took these from the Jamaica Tourist Board’s own website. […] ‘This amounts to harassment contrary to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 which is a criminal offence. I am advising you that in the event my email address remains on your website 24 hours after receipt of this email …’ […] And we wouldn’t like to put you to any trouble – after all you’re going to be quite busy reporting to the police your own website, because that had your name and your address and even a little thumbnail picture, and was a plain and obvious invitation for members of the public to send you emails which is, as everyone knows, harassment. Grumpy Old Sod
So let me make this point very clearly and precisely. It is fine for Ms Fox to publicise and broadcast her address mail@visitjamaica.uk.com on the Jamaica Tourist Board contact page and for you to read it there and perhaps write to her, but do not under any circumstance tell it to anybody else, because it is a highly confidential secret and your breaking that confidentiality would constitute a severe form of harassment. The same goes for the public retelling of the content of a high circulation public newspaper, of course that content too is highly intimate and confidential.