Every depot I know runs on a group chat. Ours were set up by shift managers, on their own phones, years before anybody in IT knew about them. They were how cover got arranged at five in the morning, how a broken dock door was reported, and how the night shift told the day shift what it had left behind.
I found out how much they carried in March, when a former agency worker posted a photograph in one of them. He had left eight months earlier and was still a member. The photograph was of a delivery note he had found online, which was harmless. What alarmed the depot manager was realising what else that man had been able to read since he left: the weekly rota with names and phone numbers, the gate code each time it changed, photographs of route sheets with customer addresses, and once a picture of a whiteboard listing which colleagues were off sick and why.
We asked every depot manager to count. There were a hundred and thirty groups across our sites. Between them they had about four thousand members, and roughly nine hundred of those were people we could not match to anybody currently working for us. Most were former agency staff, who change often and leave without a leaving process. Some were drivers from subcontracted carriers. A few nobody could identify at all. None of this had ever been on a risk register, because none of it ran on equipment we owned.
Banning the groups would not have worked. They existed because they were the quickest way for a shift to talk to itself, and nothing we provided came close.
Each site now has a managed messaging space on the platform we already pay for, with membership taken from the workforce system and the agency feed, so a person leaves the group on the day they leave the shift. The gate code and the rota are posted only there. Shift managers closed their old groups themselves once the new ones worked on an ordinary phone without a corporate login screen at five in the morning. We reported the sickness photograph to our data protection officer, who decided it was not notifiable.
The groups had always been part of how we ran the depots. We simply had not counted the people still listening.
– Serguey Shinder
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