Doing This at Work Could Land You in Jail

You may think it’s a trivial thing, until you’re facing a lawsuit or a potentially ruined career…

During our working day, most of us will come into contact with an awful lot of information. Some of it will be privileged and only for the eyes of certain people in the organisation. Some other may be sensitive but governed by the rules of common sense, i.e. not to be published or spread in any way. The problem is, most of this information is in easily shareable format.

That spreadsheet of customers you have on your pen drive? Is it encrypted? If someone got hold of it an put it in their computer, would they be able to download all the information and use it?

The fact is, data is in ever more transportable formats, and if it’s not being transported on pen drives and portable hard drives, it can easily be transmitted through email and via cloud storage.

I’m willing to guess you have a Google Drive or DropBox account. You maybe something similar (there are so many of them about these days) and it probably only costs a few dollars a month to maintain, but are you managing it correctly? Do you know what’s on there and do you make sure that it’s not open to everyone?

A few weeks ago I was sent a link to a DropBox folder, I clicked on it and it was full of very sensitive images of a new project. Someone had shared it so that “anybody with the link” could access it, and no password was needed to access it. Is this secure enough?

There’s also the problem of obsolescence. Data very often expires after a certain amount of time; it’s the nature of an ever-moving world. But do you keep information up to date and more importantly, do you delete information that is now wrong?

Looking after sensitive information is essential to maintaining a healthy relationship with customers and suppliers. They will assume (because most won’t check) that the data you hold about them is secure. They’ll also expect that you won’t be storing incorrect information and will update it if it needs to be changed for some reason. Moreover, they’ll expect you not to be sending that data all over the place and certainly not to competitors.

There is, however, a more sinister side to this. The prosecution of people and companies for the willful stealing of data is happening more often these days. When a person leaves a big company, there may be a temptation to take some of the information you gained while you were there away with you. You’ve built it up over all those years so why not? Well, it could land you in a lot of trouble.

The data that you’ve gained is the rightful property of the company you worked for at the time, and you are essentially stealing it. This data will have a value, and if you’re found to have taken it with the intention of using it for gain, you could end up in a lot of trouble.

As an individual in a company, it is your duty to ensure all the data you hold is secure. Your company should also have policies that ensure proper procedures for the collection, usage and eventual destruction of this data. If it doesn’t, it’s worth getting them in place quickly before it becomes a problem.

This article originally appeared in: http://www.theofficesuppliessupermarket.com/articles/doing-this-at-work-could-land-you-in-jail