Abuse of Power and SDC HR

The Shepwayvox team have discovered that SDC has been snooping into one of our members. They have been looking at our one of our members LinkedIn pages, Facebook page and other social media sites they use. Of course this is not illegal, it open source after all.  All one has to do, is type into your facebook search “people who work at Shepway District Council” then click people and hey presto there are literally hundreds of them. One can do something similar on LinkedIn too.

This we believe is an unnecessary intrusion to gather open source intelligence on a person who has done nothing wrong except assist the team in publishing articles here on Shepwayvox.

Is SDC’s intrusion a breach of privacy, probably not, but it does demonstrate how they can snoop on your data self. Of course they could have been checking them out for a possible job offer; which we believe is not the reason.

As an aside, Andrina Smith (Chartered Fellow CIPD – pictured). Head of HR at Shepway District Council, worked previously at K College as head of HR. She left to join SDC and in doing so took three junior members of her HR staff at K college with her.

What Shepwayvox would like to know is were these three members of staff interviewed? How did Andrina get them on board? Were these three jobs advertised and did others have an opportunity to apply for them? There are rules regarding jobs and advertising them.

Who authorised this? Was the process wholly open and transparent? If so, will SDC show the people of Shepway that everything was above board and who is accountable?

We have emailed SDC Head of HR Ms Andrina Smith for a comment. As of yet she has failed to respond. We suspect she will not reply, but we live in hope.

We also wait to here from SDC about their unnecessary and unwarranted intrusive behaviour regarding the necessity to use open source intelligence to snoop. What grounds make them believe they can justify their snooping?

Finally, we ask SDC to inform the people of Shepway about how three junior members of the former K College HR Department came to work at SDC.

Are these acceptable behaviours by the Council? And what if anything did Cllr David Monk know?

Shepwayvox