Some companies have the annoying habit to label every document they publish internally by the word "confidential". I understand that there are things that should not become public and thus must be kept confidential but some companies often label stuff published internally as confidential although the same thing with almost the same wording was published to the press as well. You may ask: "What's the problem?" --- Well, what do you think how serious the company employees will take the word "confidential" if it seems to be already included in the letterhead of the standard internal letter paper of the company.
But some companies have already recognized this problem and thus invented the wording "strictly confidential". --- What's the meaning of this? And what's the difference to the simple version of "confidential"? Does this mean that you should tell around the "confidential" stuff but not the "strictly confidential" stuff? But it seems that at some companies even the "strictly confidential" stuff is no longer to be considered serious because I have already seen flyers placed near the entrance to the lunchroom of a company that was labeled "strictly confidential". Do they really believe that this information does not spread if they place it at such a prominent place? Especially when the lunchroom is also accessible by some visitors.
So what is the reason for all this? Did some people from internal marketing just watch too many James Bond films, are they just plain stupid, or is their intention actually to attract attention by labeling leaflets that way. Ok, you can't do anything about the first two possible causes but if the last one is the actual reason then those people should notice that it is problematic what they are doing. If they are using words like "confidential" in such a meaningless way people might ignore it even when they get information that is _really_ confidential and this actually _can_ hurt a company.
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