Hi! I’m Bruce Naylor and welcome to these weeks edition of the FrugalTechnologyShow, I’m your host Bruce Naylor and every week we’re talking about small business technology. How to make money with technology, how to make money with technology, how to save money with technology and sometimes technology you need to stay away from. Every week our show has a theme and this week we’re talking about some things you do in your small business to help ensure privacy of your customers is personally identify about information that maybe available on your computer network. Might be available through the internet an article by a monthly invest to the Microsoft small business website, came to my attention. I really like some of the information that is passing us so here we go.
The name of this article is Get Serious about Privacy. Six tips for small business so the article goes on to say “owe it to your customers and employees to protect them from ID theft. Boy you sure do. There’s scam, there’s fraud, there’s all kinds of bad things out there having on the internet and there’s some best practices that you can follow to help you obey the law. Keep your customers happy. Keeps your business driving in these times?
So number one is to take inventory, personal information that you collect and that you still work. Privacy in list recommend compiling a within inventory of the personal identify with information that you collect such as Social Security numbers, email addresses, addresses all that sort of thing and you know for example you know does your website use cookies to capture information and so what about and visits your site and know any contracts and agreements that you have with other businesses. They trade secrets of other businesses that you may posses and that would constitute sense of information. So take stocks of just you don’t want information, you’re collecting and who you’re sharing that information with.
Now number two, is to analyze how safely use to store this data. Believe it or not many, many small businesses okay are know just store that information on their customer facing website. And those face can be really hack very easily so many others allow their employees unfair to access to such data. Still there are others who are none show out really about sending spreadsheets containing this personal identifiable information or PII an encrypt to the internet, the email bad mistake don’t do that.
The next step, make sure you’re complying with industry or federal laws. Now strong privacy policies and practices maybe mandatory if your business is governed by certain government regulations, for example there is with notice HIPAA which is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. There’s a grant liege by the act. There is CPNI which stands for customer proprietary network information. There’s PCISS which is the Payment Card Industry Security Standard. That’s kind of a tongue twister for me. And then you also have the European Union on Daily Protection as well as being actually. So you may want to pay attention to all how that you’re in compliance with all this things.
Number four. Post a privacy policy that is clear and comprehensive. A handful states had their own privacy laws and some of the things that you should be looking for is posting is ready bur or sell, emailing list, have any sharing of personally identify doing information and co-marketing agreements with your partners whether your website uses cookies or not, information for customers to contact your business and how to be removed from a list and if you’re still online how that you comply with the payment card industry security standards. Also have your policy reviewed by an attorney or by privacy CO program is wise to get outside opinion on your privacy policy either from attorney or from a privacy expert.
Another option is using an online privacy services is trust as capital T-R-U-S-T and a lower case e or the better business bureau online. And finally if you have employees make sure that there are personal information is protected as well. Common sense but make sure that you do it is way easy to overlooked at data as most privacy policies deals with more strongly with customer information and to your clients but make sure you’re protecting your employees. Well I think that’s some really good tips on how to handle that kind of data.
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