Email

You may consider my little story on protection of privacy weird (see http://ccszeto.blogspot.com/2009/08/ai-2.html). To my surprise, there is a similar recent happening to our email system.

The story goes like this: As a university staff, we all have an official email account. Since we have clinical duty, the Hospital Authority gives us another internal account for communication of (presumably) clinical affairs - we usually call it The Intranet.

The problem is: the two systems cannot easily communication with each other, and, many of us would have to go (from our office) to the ward and use a different computer to log on to the hospital system and read the message.

The result is obvious: many of our academic colleagues just ignore the system. After all, this clinical account is largely for distribution of (labelled as Highly Important) messages on some unrelated seminars or nanny reminders from some planets outside the solar system. In the old days, relevant materials (for example, our duty list) would be sent to our university account.

The recent change is: The Hospital Authority would only send message to our intranet account - and say sayonara to the university system.

You may ask: Why ?

We asked the same question, and the answer was for the protection of privacy and any sensitive information.

Let me give you 24 hours to digest their logic of this explanation.