How is your service professional keeping your private information confidential & protected?
Image by Wordle: protecting client information
How is your service professional keeping your private information
confidential & protected?
Everything Cheryl Bower, CRS, with Zephyr Real Estate in San Francisco, needed to know about data security, she learned from a dentist.
After working in a dentist’s office for several years, she had internalized the industry’s strict patient-privacy practices.
After becoming a REALTOR®, she had a constant, nagging worry about the sensitive information contained in her client files and what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands. As a result, she decided to transition to a paperless office and adopt other security measures, such as asking clients to refrain from sharing sensitive data, password-protecting her computer and using a device-tracking service to help her locate her computer if it should be lost or stolen.
REALTORS® have a unique set of challenges when it comes to data security, says Ed Moyle, manager, CTG Security Solutions, a Buffalo, N.Y.–based provider of data-security solutions. After all, it’s routine for REALTORS® to handle some of the most sensitive personal information in consumers’ lives, including Social Security numbers, financial data and information about creditworthiness.
“They’re often called on to store and access this sensitive data from, in many cases, computers that serve double-duty as both home and work machines. This scenario creates a pretty high [data safety] bar,” he adds.
Good data-security and privacy practices can help agents keep their clients’ information out of the wrong hands.
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