When It Comes to Consumer Data, There's No Such Thing As Too Careful
Yesterday was a crazy day. These days, most are. Amongst all of the craziness I got a dropbox message saying someone had dropped off documents for me to review. I hadn't expected any, so my curiosity was piqued. In my dropbox was a HUD-1 settlement sheet and some closing info for Mr. Smith. The problem is, I have no idea who Mr. Smith is. I have no idea who either of the real estate agents listed on the HUD are. I have no idea who the title agency is. Someone had sent me an awful lot of transaction details, and clearly they weren't meant to be sent to me.
In this day and age, there's no such thing as being 'too careful' when sending sensitive information. The things that can be done with information like someone's date of birth, social security number, and address are pretty terrifying. Life can be made incredibly inconvenient (at best) with just a simple slip up or accidental email.
Corporations have gone a long way to protect data, but even some of the largest haven't been able to avoid slips and compromised consumer information - see Target & Home Depot. What even the largest, most tech savvy corporation cannot control though, is attention to detail when sending and receiving information. In my dropbox instance, someone simply sent something to the wrong place - could have been a typo, an incorrect autopopulated email address, or any number of mistakes, but regardless - someone's info was sent somewhere it shouldn't have gone.
In the real estate industry and especially the mortgage business, we handle very personal financial information. It's a gold mine for data miners and marketing companies, and anyone else that could potentially benefit from the information. For this reason, there's no step that's too great to protect personal data.
What steps do you have in place to protect the personal information of the people you work with?
When it comes to consumer data, there's no such thing as too careful
Comments (14)Subscribe to CommentsComment