This is an article written for us by Nuance with five tips to keep your candidates details secure.
We all know that sinking feeling when you’ve sent a document onto someone by email and then realised it’s either the wrong person, or you’ve hit ‘reply all’ and it’s gone out to someone it’s not supposed to. We’ve all done it. It’s really hard to stop things like emails being sent to the wrong person, or to stop a document being passed onto someone else that really shouldn’t have it. But there are ways of making sure that if a document does happen to get outside of its intended audience, that it is protected.
Some recent research by Cloud Tweaks has found that 80% of document leakages are accidental. Security specialist firm Kaspersky, has shown that accidental sharing of data by legitimate staff, now accounts for more lost data than threats from malware or other cybersecurity attacks. If you put these two facts together you realise that it is really important to make sure that the content you share has the right level of protection set. Lost data isn’t just an embarrassment; it hits right across the organization, from candidates personal details, to company private data, to loss of finances, to negative brand impact.
There are some simple things that you can do, small measures that can make a massive difference and give you peace of mind, if you do accidentally click the ‘send all’ button.
Top Five Tips for Document Safety
What we are really talking about here, to give it its technical term, is digital rights management. That is taking some content and making sure that it gets into the right hands, stays in those hands and those hands only do with it, what you decide.
Make sure it won’t get left on the printer: If a document is very sensitive you may want to prevent printing altogether. Print is a useful right to control, if it really doesn’t need to be in hard copy, keep it electronic by setting print controls. You can then rest assured that your recipient won’t print it out and leave it on the printer for all to see.
Prevent copy of images and text: This is a really useful option you can set in a document. It will prevent recipients from copying text and even graphics. Some products even offer screenshot prevention. It’s really useful if the information is sensitive, or contains proprietary information and especially if it contains personal details, like a CV does. Lost personal information is one of the causes of identity fraud.
Embargoes and expiration: A rights control option available in some PDF products is to set time limits on the opening of a PDF document. For example, you may have a job that is embargoed until a certain date, or that needs to expire on a certain day.
Stop it getting into the wrong hands: Or in other words controlling who accesses the document. PDF documents can be password protected and encrypted at the same time. The recipient needs to know the password to access the document. If you accidentally email it to the wrong person, they won’t be able to open it.
Redaction of really sensitive parts of a document: Redaction is a great way to control, who sees what, within a document. Redaction is where you use a PDF tool to blank out chosen areas of a document, like, sentences, paragraphs and even whole pages. A recipient would open the document and see only the text and images you want them to see, everything else is blanked out. You have to be careful to redact efficiently, capturing all references to the redacted areas. There are some very powerful PDF products that allow you to have effective redaction using search and find features.
Taking control of your documents is easier than you think and will not only prevent your company from being a data loss statistic, but will protect your candidates too, helping you create a brand or agency that is trusted.
