General question - what makes confidential confidential?
Is it enough to write it on sheet of paper? And how about other pages that don't have this clause?
General, open-ended question... Thanks.
Two of us were working at the local hackerspace late night. We had some trash we took out to the dumpster, and we saw a desktop tower. It had a bit of dried mud on it, so it was probably there no more than a few hours.
I take it in, and I put it in the 'dedicated desktop testing area' (read: wherever there was a keyboard/mouse/monitor). I was expecting some massive dead machine. Nope. there was a 80GB hard drive, cd/dvd, RAM, CPU.. Everything was there, and it boot right into WinXP.
Then the ohshit factor came into play. On the desktop there were icons for "Anthem Insurance Quoter", "Blue Cross Quotes".... and Client List.xls.pdf . That list alone had 500 names, SSN, DOB, address, and phone numbers. And there even more files with more identities as well. So, what do I do? Oh, and I also found the agent's name along with his license number. Nifty. He googles to about 2.5 miles away.
So.. is this a discarded machine, or was this a drop site after a theft? I don't know, and powering it up didn't tell me. There wasn't any security on the machine at all, so anybody could have plugged in a USB storage and copied without fear of logs.
I took it to the police. That's not because of the hardware, but because they can alert the users on this machine of possible identity theft and take appropriate steps.
(Yes, I do know where on Tor to sell identities like this. And the quality of these would have been roughly 100$/per. And I'm poor, but damned if I'll be unethical like that.)
A couple of days ago I found a wallet with what looked like £40 (Didn't count it), travelcard and bank cards in it. I could have taken the money and put it the rest in the bin.
I could have even skimmed the credit/debit cards and gone on a spending spree!
But I did not.
I went to the local shop and enquired - 'do you know this guy?' The wallet owner actually lived in the flats above the shop and the wallet was returned.
To the owner of the wallet this was an unexpected turn up for the books - his faith in human nature restored etc. - fine, but not a tangible benefit to me (unless there is a god).
However, there actually is a tangible benefit, one that I did not think of when I enquired in the shop. The owner of the shop now knows that I will do the right thing for a complete stranger that happens to have lost a wallet. Hence, if I lose my wallet and cannot afford so much as a pint of milk, I can expect a favour from him, i.e. some necessities on credit until I can sort out my wallet.
All I am saying is that there may be benefits to returning the documents, benefits that you have not thought of.
PS: if I were the OP I would try to return or destroy them.
Depending on information, how it is used, etc. I can imagine him losing his job.
If the OP has found information that will genuinely allow him to place stock trades at an advantage to the rest of the market then some people are going to lose something.
Conversely, doing the wrong thing probably means that the 'unintended consequences' are bad - getting caught etc.
You could take the documents and through thinking of 'I have struck gold' and nothing else, walk out of the cab and into the on-coming bus, to go under it and be rescued by the paramedics.
However, what I think you are getting at has been discussed regarding music.
Imagine finding a USB stick, making a perfect copy of it. When you get home you find that it contains the latest and as yet unreleased album by your favourite artist. Being good you don't post it onto youtube or even let your mates have a copy. However, even then the record label would deem you a pirate, if they found out. But we have had that argument.
Or...
The financial scenario: you find documents that Google are to make a cash bid for Facebook next week. You sell your mother and buy lots of shares in Facebook. The bid happens and you get to sell your shares, buy your mother back and make a tidy profit. Seems simple, victimless crime!
However, the documents could have been planted there (and elsewhere) by someone in the city with lots of shares to sell and wanting to 'secretly tip' the market so they profit. In this case you lose out on your investment and cannot buy your mother back.
Or Sergei and Brin find they have lost their documents in the back of the cab, see it as an omen, and don't go ahead with the bid.
However, if you did try and return the documents and were successfully able to do so, they might give you a T-shirt and a pat on the back for being good. They might even give you a job.
Here is a joyful parable:
The Parable of the Flowers
Believing in God is to believe in God's presence and uniqueness. This belief saves the person from meaninglessness and from being errant. Assuming that lies would make a person happy is to go after a dream that will never come true. Reality is God's consent.
In old times, there was a sagacious emperor, and his people loved him. But the emperor was enduring an absence; he did not have a son or a daughter. After a while, the emperor decided to adopt a child.
Public criers shouted, "Listen to me people! On Friday our emperor will adopt a child. This child must be a ten year-old boy; our emperor will leave his throne to his foster son, and he will rest. The people who want to give their sons to the emperor should gather in front of the palace on Friday."
Before the crier finished talking, the public square in front of the palace became full of ten year-old boys.
The emperor gave flower seeds to each boy, and declared his condition: "After sowing these seeds and growing them, you should bring me a bunch of flowers. Of whose flowers that I become fond of, that boy will become my adopted son. You have three months; after this period it is our decision to gather in this same place."
Three months passed. The emperor went to the square and saw that the square was full of beautiful flowers with different colors. The boys who had taken the seeds were waiting for the happy moment.
The emperor looked attentively at the boys while passing near them without stopping.
At another corner stood a boy crying who had no flowers in his hands. The emperor went near the boy, and stopped. He asks:
"Why are you crying?"
The boy spoke of his trouble:
"My emperor, the seeds that your Excellency has given me did not grow despite my efforts. I tried everything, but in vain. I am weeping because you will not adopt me since I do not have any flowers."
The emperor replied, "Do not cry because of that, because I will adopt you as my son. Your seeds did not become flowers because I boiled them before giving them to you. These people who have brought flowers think that they can deceive me. Their flowers are not from my seeds. They found them somewhere else" said the emperor and hugged the boy.
"You told me the truth; you did not lie to me. Listen carefully, it is the person who accepts the truth, not the liar, who will become happy in the end."
I'm sympathetic to your conclusion, but this seems spurious reasoning. Why is it more likely that you'd be hit by a bus thinking about how you're going to take advantage of the information than hit by a bus thinking about how you're going to get the documents back to the person?
Unbalanced positive ramifications are most likely to be social.
Most people that step out into the road in front of me on my commute are doing the 'ipod shuffle', distracted by text or talking about what they are going to have for dinner. So it isn't as if they are distracted by anything really significant and in some way that is where the danger is - an assumption they can multi-task whilst crossing the road. If they were interrupted by someone calling to say they had won the lottery etc. then they probably would stop in their tracks and not attempt to cross the road there and then.
When I found the wallet the other day I did think whether anyone had seen me and I did think about whether there was CCTV and whether I could get caught had I just taken the money. However I quickly decided that I was going to try and return the wallet. I made a few paces up the road before turning back and going to the corner shop to see if they recognised the guy in the travelcard photo. I was distracted, no question about it, and, had I needed to have crossed a road then I might not have had my wits about me.
So, what would have happened had I decided to take the money? Rather than think about whether I had been seen I would have had to actually check every bit of street furniture for CCTV and every window overlooking me. I would have had to surreptitiously put the wallet in a pocket and gone through the thought process of where I was to dispose of it etc. Maybe, as a result, I would have been extra careful on the road.
However, I believe that cheating/stealing/doing wrong poses an abnormal and detrimental strain to thinking. By analogy, one of my Scrabble playing friends has this habit of cheating. He is a journalist with a considerable vocabulary, with pride to match. Therefore he has to win. However, the rest of us know that he sometimes does things with the letters bag and sometimes we choose to turn a blind eye. The added strain of cheating and not getting caught affects his game meaning that he puts himself at a competitive disadvantage. He can have a rack full of 'Q's and 'Z's and miss a seven letter triple word score word like 'quizzed' because he is more focused on trying to get a 'U' from the bag when there is a perfectly good one on the board already.
To conclude, it is the element of deceit.
And that's what makes this tricky, because stock market situations are so unlike ordinary life. Is there deceit?
The OP has the option of returning the papers as soon as possible, and informing the people he returns them to about his stock market plans. He could in fact tell everyone he meets about his stock market plans and still be capable of a tidy profit.
There's something uncomfortable about the situation, but it's really hard to pin down what it is, and I don't think there's any dishonesty involved.
An interesting moral for a situation based on finding information.
Seriously. See a lawyer.
People on the internet are not lawyers; if they are lawyers, their main advice is go see a lawyer.
Law is a profession of tiny details with huge consequences. Those tiny details vary from place to place and from subject to subject. Even lawyers have lawyers.
If I learnt one and only one important lesson from my time in law school, it's this: If you have a question of law, go see a lawyer.
I mean it.
There is nothing wrong with asking about the experiences of others who may have asked lawyers similar questions, as long as we understand that we should directly seek a lawyer's advice in proportion to what is at stake.
By sharing our legal experiences, we'd all become better at understanding the specific questions we should ask a lawyer, should the need arise.
As I said, law varies by place and subject. Those differences matter. Some subjects are generally consistent across jurisdictions. Some are not.
Who knows which is which? The professionals.
Who has the knowledge and experience to correctly interpret different experiences in different circumstances? The professionals.
Intelligent people frequently form entirely inaccurate views of subjects in which they are not experts. We mock TV shows for having VB GUIs that track IP addresses. Lawyers feel a bit like this when non-lawyers begin swapping legal advice.
> By sharing our legal experiences, we'd all become better at understanding the specific questions we should ask a lawyer, should the need arise.
Lawyers are not unapproachable gods. They are service professionals like any other. You ring, make an appointment, and talk to them. It's really very simple. They will ask some questions and take some notes. If it's a simple matter they will give a simple answer. If it's more complicated they will ask to get back to you.
Self-help and Stack Overflow is fine for writing most low-risk software, where bugs can be patched. It is a risky strategy with law. Some actions cannot be undone. You can't just revert to the "before I made that legal blunder" branch.
We cannot possibly achieve a broad understanding of the law if the only knowledge we have about how the law works comes directly from our own personal conversations with a lawyer.
I'm thinking of purchasing a 50 euro piece of software from a company in Germany. Do I need to obtain customs authorization to purchase software from countries other than the US? Perhaps I need a permit to run German software? Maybe it's against the law to even visit a site in Germany unless I'm an EU citizen? Perhaps I need to start paying some of my income and corporation taxes to Germany if my business uses any German software?
If we are completely clueless about what is legal and what is not, the costs of running all of these questions past a lawyer would bring the economy to a halt.
As I noted elsewhere, most legal relationships, transactions, events and conditions exist without ever being noticed or cared about. That is as it should be.
But in cases of high risk or uncertainty, go see a lawyer.
The OP would be insane to act solely based on the comments he reads here, but there is value for everyone in having the discussion, even if people give bad advice and then other people set the matter right. All the better if the OP comes back and tells us later how it all worked out. I just sounds to me like you're trying to shut down an interesting discussion. I say "go ask a lawyer, but still go ahead and ask us too!"
The only correct advice is "see a lawyer".
The simple fact that we have to tell people to go see a lawyer for protecting themselves just shows how wrong the society is (in the USA in particular) regarding laws.
But more than that, people should at least be able to get an educated answer on what to do, other that "go pay money to that guy, he knows AND this will shield you from legal issues that could ruin your life."
I mean, seriously.
The law almost always goes on without anybody having to notice or take additional action. We are always moving through and interacting with the invisible web of the law. It works so well that we only notice it when something goes awry or something unusual happens (like OP's situation -- if it were normal, people would have a better idea of what to do).
Yesterday I entered into several legal contracts. We went through all the legal formalities under common and statue law, created mutually binding obligations, discharged our legal requirements and then went on our respective ways. These variously took the form of buying groceries, hailing a cab, buying dinner, picking up laundry (with the added bonus of bailee-bailor relationship) and getting a haircut.
Because nothing unusual happened, I didn't think about the law. At all. But it was there.
Law is a sufficiently large field (remember, the problem domain is "all interactions between humans") that it requires specialisation and so, in fact, lawyers must frequently consult with other lawyers. OP may get an answer from a general practice solicitor. Or that lawyer may need to consult another lawyer. Until he or she sees a lawyer it's not clear to us lay folk.
Does this ever annoy you?
You're good with computers, can you make a poster for me?
This reminds me of tax filling.
> Even lawyers have lawyers.
Do accountants have accountants too?
Your immediate reaction seems to be "how can I turn this into money without legal consequences?" Did you ever consider just doing nothing? Trying to return them?
So forget about what's legal and just do what's right.
You are in a unique time and place in history (as evidenced by your presence here) to build something out of nothing and provide great value to others. So why don't you just forget about what you found and instead spend your precious energy building something?
As for the documents, either return them or destroy them and please move on. For everyone's sake.
it's not even obvious that insider trading should be illegal (http://business.time.com/2013/07/26/why-is-insider-trading-e...). (not particularly relevant, but i do think certain types of insider trading should definitely be illegal but the scope is debatable.)
1. Are you a lawyer?
2. If so, in what jurisdiction is your qualification valid?
3. What if the taxi in question is in Zurich, say?
4. Are you going to qualify your answer in any way, or is it absolute?
In most countries though, you're under duty to return the documents to the owner ASAP, and you're eligible to some kind of compensation according to the value of the documents.
If you want an useful answer, you need to tell more details to a relevant lawyer; currently this question can only get answers that are either useless or dangerous.
Be careful of acting on that idea; just because something is morally reasonable doesn't make it legal. I heard of a case once where someone sold shares based on happening to see a factory on fire through an airplane window, and a court found it to be insider trading. Sure, maybe that case wasn't representative; I'm not a lawyer - but consult someone who is, before assuming that sort of thing is legal.
That plane thing seems to have been an erroneous hypothetical.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! In SEC vs. Texas Gulf Sulfur Co., those who had access to information not available to the general public and who used it to their advantage were seen to be insiders. [1]
In United States vs Carpenter, the judge stated that "It is well established, as a general proposition, that a person who acquires special knowledge or information by virtue of a confidential or fiduciary relationship with another is not free to exploit that knowledge or information for his own personal benefit but must account to his principal for any profits derived therefrom." [2]
1. http://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/corporations/corporations...
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Court_decisions
in texas gulf sulfur, the defendants were officers at the company. they were directors at texas gulf sulfur and they were trading on texas gulf sulfur stock. they have a fiduciary duty to the company that a stranger doesn't have.
that's what the judge in carpenter is referring to. if you acquire the info by virtual of a fiduciary relationship, you aren't free to trade on that info. in texas gulf sulfur, they had the fiduciary relationship to the company because they were officers at that company. not so here.
http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=117...
Confidentiality is a an agreement between parties not to disclose information to a third party.
You are now talking about the unintended disclosure of confidential information.
Since you are not a party to the confidentiality agreement, it is impossible to enforce against you.
As far as insider trader, I don't suspect a random person who stumbled upon such data lawfully could be found guilty of any crime for using it.
Moving from an absolutely legal treatment of the problem to an ethical/moral one. What you want to happen if you were the owner of those documents?
Something to consider.
That sounds like terrible advice to me. See this for example: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/100803.asp
> Oftentimes, people accused of the crime claim that they just overheard someone talking. Take for example a neighbor who overhears a conversation between a CEO and her husband regarding confidential corporate information. If the neighbor then goes ahead and makes a trade based on what was overheard, he or she would be violating the law even though the information was just "innocently" overheard: the neighbor becomes an insider with a fiduciary duty and obligation to confidentiality the moment he or she comes to possess the nonpublic material information. Since, however, the CEO and her husband did not try to profit from their insider knowledge, they are not necessarily liable of insider trading. In their carelessness, they may, however, be in breach of their confidentiality.
Wow, that's the stupidest thing I've read all day. Is all of investopedia this broken?
Like holding a monopoly, "insider trading" is not automatically a crime. Some specific conditions have to be met.
Note, I agree with the currently most upvoted comment that you should see a lawyer. If you wouldn't make enough money by trading on this information to make seeing a lawyer worth it, then it isn't worth taking the risk of making the trade.
Consider this, how would the fact that you took a random ride in the same cab as the "tipper" ever be established? In other words, what would be the basis of the insider information allegation? How would they ever know?
but the black letter law as of when i was a lawyer (2010) is that you can trade on an overheard conversation (see the switzer case involving the famed oklahoma football coach).
you don't have a fiduciary duty to the company and you don't inherit the duty from the tipper because the tipper tipped without personal benefit.
edit a reliable reference (contra some of the other sources cited in this thread): http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/08/insider-t...
But here's the thing ... if you do something you believe is wrong, illegal or immoral, you'll still have to live with yourself. Being human, having empathy (what if you'd lost your confidential papers), being sympathetic and generally operating within the folkways and mores of society serves a purpose. People who can operate without any of these qualities are classified as sociopaths.
So my recommendation isn't to talk to a lawyer, or take any actions related to the papers. Burn them (preferably without reading them) and keep your inward smile. Living with yourself is more enjoyable if you actually like yourself (and find yourself likeable).
EDIT: Posted this at the same time as kefka ... read his response for a real life application of what I've written. And nice to meet you kefka!
1) You identify the source of the documents (not necessarily who they refer to but who created them) and you return them.
2) You turn them into a nearby law enforcement office and get a receipt.
3) You destroy them and forgot you ever saw them.
#1 it is important to know the source, if you go by the company in the printouts and the source was an SEC auditor who was looking into the company, then returning them to the company being audited would screw up the SEC audit. In #2 it is important to get a receipt because if the documents are part of a larger problem going on you will want to be able to prove you held them for a very short time as you transferred them to the police. Anything else and whether or not you did anything with them you will be part of the investigation. And #3, they were lost in the first place, someone knows they are lost and are dealing with that. That just finishes a path they were already on. [1]
Under no circumstances do you try to profit from the discovery as that will make you a criminal in the eyes of the law. That stuff always turns out badly.
[1] Note my wife suggested that you might give them to the Taxi driver to take back to their lost and found so if the owner called in looking for them they would have them handy.
If I were you, I would consider handing back to their investor relations and try to build a new contact. It may work, it may not.
So that makes it okay to transfer your life savings to my account, right?
If you read between the lines, it amounts to "What is the minimum legal standard I have to follow to make money on this questionably gotten X?"
That's a sad question to have to ask.
Nobody is stealing anything. They can have the pieces of paper back if they want them.
So I will just email myself a copy of your work and patent it before you can.
No harm then right, it is just a copy.
So you could be the first person to break the news of my amazing new invention while I am filing the patent, or something. I might be disgruntled but it's my fault for leaving the netbook there.
It's not like you'd be able to patent something you didn't invent without tremendous piles of fraud.
What would happen if we had a "double blind" system where people could receive insider trading information based on karma points? The idea is that a system would anonymously give out insider trading information to one or more people with the highest amount of karma. The granter of the stock tip would get a corresponding boost (or drop) in karma based on the value of the knowledge but couldn't benefit from the insider information directly with the exception in the future they would have a greater likely hood of getting anonymous insider information based on their karma point count.
example: 1) Alice creates an anomymous tip that Apple stock is likely to drop due to an unexpected sales decrease of the iphone 6. 2) The system establishes an initial weight for the stock tip based on company valuation and reliability of Alice. 3) The system identifies a user or set of users with the highest current karma points. Bob is one of these users. Bob's karma point total is reduced by the value of the recommendation. 4) Later on after banking a large number of points Alice is given a tip that Tesla stock is expected to rise. Alice is able to profit on this insider knowledge without... really having insider knowledge
This is somewhat akin to profiting off of documents in the back seat of a taxi. Since this seems like somewhat of an obvious system I wonder if it is practiced in real life and what law enforcement does to counter it....
My_Op => prob huge neg val even thinking about this.
Long Term: moral reasons aside, its simply highly unlikely to net add personal value.
Short Term: payoff is blindingly quantifiable, but lots of hidden costs easy to overlook => not a good likely outcome situation.
Ex 1: "not wasting energy with lawyers" is a luxury, both massively positive value and systematically + tragically under-valued by general people
If only you get rid of the printouts you're safe because nobody can prove anything so basically you're free to do what you feel is right. After the printouts are gone and you do happen to remember what they said, there's absolutely no way to connect that information to you.
The owner of the papers might want them back though, so consider that too, please. You can return them in an anonymous envelope if you want your identity to not be disclosed.
If the documents were misplaced, and you take them, then that's theft. Hand them in to the police. Don't use them.
Second, if you wanted to you might used part of it you would have to be very careful and pair it with something totally yours.
Oh, and laws vary from country to country. Ethics are a different thing