National Identity Fraud Prevention Week

This week is National Identity Fraud Prevention Week so with luck you will see items in the press about what you can do. The short answer is simple - guard sensitive and confidential information as if it were your own.

Remember, all information is of value to someone, so look after it and when you have finished with it, dispose of it properly. Shred old documentation, erase old disk drives, encrypt sensitive information that is leaving company premises (whether it is on a laptop, CD ROM or backup tape.)

Perhaps the best thing you can do is to get the CEO or Managing director to send an email out to everyone - reminding them about the risks and consequences of losing data. We shouldn’t need a week to remind us of the problems that data loss can create - this is something we need to think about everyday.

October 6, 2008 | Filed Under security | Leave a Comment 

Do You Join… Or Not

I seem to have been inundated with requests to join a new ‘Business Social Networking’ service. It appears that a quite a few people I know have joined up… they have then had their address book savaged and emails sent to everyone they know. So… here’s the dilemma, do you sign up or not? I belong to one business social networking site already, do I really need another?

I think the answer is no - I don’t need another, especially as the one I belong to is well established and does what I need it to (basically keep email addresses up to date - people change jobs all the time, so keeping up with a valid address can be a real task.) Having said I don’t need to sign up to another service, I have joined this new one… why? Just so no-one else can join as ‘me’. I have posted my picture but that is all - and I didn’t let the system look through my address book!

Internet based reputation is just around the corner but it isn’t here yet - and when it does arrive it needs to be guaranteed and user friendly. In the mean time, if someone has put my details out on the web and I need to have an account to correct them, or to keep someone else from signing up as me, then I will. This isn’t foolproof, far from it, there are so many ‘free’ email providers, social websites and the like, if you want to be someone else, it is very easy to do, perhaps a little too easy?

June 2, 2008 | Filed Under Reputation | Leave a Comment