Partner Article

The privacy paradox: The importance of security in business communication

For today’s generation of hyper connected worker, it’s perfectly normal to have a range of communication tools open and available across any chosen device throughout the day, writes David Gurle, founder of communications startup Perzo.

However, as much as this drives the work communication environment, it also leaves businesses and individuals open to security risks they are often unaware of.

While most people think nothing of emailing or texting bank details to a friend or relative, sharing an accounting spreadsheet with a team or mailing a confidential work in progress rebranding project to an agency, all these documents and details do not simply disappear once the message is deleted and can be found by the determined. And it’s not just illegal third parties that can access our interactions as the recent Snowden revelations highlighted.

This culture of free and dare I say, reckless sharing of information has led to us to observe ‘privacy paradox’ theory: we adapt the level of privacy of our conversations depending on whom we talk to and how we communicate with them. We tend to require more privacy and dependability depending on the closeness of our relationship, or the importance of the message we want to get across. As a result we’re driven to use separate tools to manage each of those interactions.

A recent survey undertaken by ICM, on our behalf, found that the average British person spends the equivalent of four working days each week dipping in and out of email, instant messaging, texting, social networks and other forms of communication. 60% of respondents also expressed levels of frustration from having to switch between different methods of communication.

With so many different communication applications available to us, we’re propelled to communicate in a way that can make it easy for third parties to access confidential details. It also means that we dilute our own intellectual property by spreading our memories, thoughts and conversations across an overwhelming array of applications.

To date these applications have served us well. But as business and personal communications become more sophisticated, so is the need for a tool that has been created to protect a user’s interactions from unauthorised third parties. It’s time to return communication confidentiality and privacy back to individuals.

We believe that the best way to do this is to be very careful about broadcasting our messages through IM or email or even SMS. It is much safer that the message is sent to a secure platform where the recipient is invited in to view and interact with it. This allows improved privacy and application of military grade encryption to each message, so companies and individuals can be assured that their interactions will remain confidential. This allows all communications to be easily managed in one place whether it’s business or personal.

This type of privacy layer is the future of integrated communications. At Perzo we’re already seeing companies improve their own processes and obtaining more value from their communications.

Users are able to share and discuss legal or regulatory documents and even confidential files secure in the knowledge that only the sender and invited user can see them. When individuals can keep all of their interactions in one secure place where they control what they say and how they say it without risk of it being stolen or adapted, we’ll begin to see communication tools providing companies with real value, and not just simply as a way to interact.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perzo .