In today’s day and age, anyone and everyone can fall prey to hackers and spammers. This is especially true for individuals and small to medium sized businesses. Cyber syndicates or hacking rings find small enterprises easy prey as they do not have enough resources at their disposal to put measures in place that would ward off security threats.  However this shouldn’t be the case as there are solutions that small scale firms can adopt in order to effectively provide them with adequate protection against online theft, scams and fraud without hurting their finances.

Businesses cannot afford to be passive against malicious entities that are bent on stealing vital and classified information from them.  Today, business organizations can no longer solely rely on simple firewalls and antivirus programs to keep their files safe.  There is just too much at stake and so much to lose on their end if they do not adopt a proactive approach.

Continue reading 6 Email Protection Tips for SMEs

With so many businesses still trying to figure out how to leverage social media in the workplace, email continues to be the primary method of communication among employees. Whether they are communicating with co-workers, managers, customers or distributors email still reigns supreme. In fact, 94 percent of all American Internet users send or read email every day according to the Pew Research Center. In the workplace it is estimated that workers spend 41 percent of their day handling email according to the Radicati Group.

While email is still a primary means of communication among people in the workplace, many businesses fail to put in place a policy that governs how employees use email while they are on the clock. Business owners or IT managers tend to overlook laws and regulations that dictate how email should be used and stored. In small-medium sized businesses there is less of a perceived need for a email policy because employers sometimes don’t see the need to regulate things such as email and Internet use. Unfortunately this can land them in legal trouble.

Continue reading 5 Things Your Email Policy Needs to Have

In John P. Mello Jr.’s blog post, “Peeking into employee’s email can be no-no”, John details a recent New Jersey court case involving the rights of a company to view the contents of an employee’s non-business related emails on the laptop issued to the employee after the employee had left the company.

In the court case, the trial court refused to require the employer, Loving Care, to return the emails to the employee’s attorneys. A judicial panel had upheld a lower court’s ruling that it was allowable for the company to access the employee’s email communications between the employee and her attorney.

Later, however, an appellate court reversed the lower court’s decision and held that the employee had not waived their attorney-client privilege.

As it turns out, the laws regarding email privacy vary not only at state level but also at the federal level. For example, if one of the employees in your company sends an email from their state to someone else in another state the question could come up – which state’s email privacy laws supersedes the other state’s email privacy law? As it happens, what might be considered legal to read in one state might, in another state, be considered illegal and unjustified to read.

According to the State of California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA) of 2003, companies which operate commercial websites must disclose their privacy policy with regard to what data they might collect and share with other organizations. That data could theoretically include the contents of email messages that pass through their servers.

Continue reading Employee Email Privacy Considerations