Trusttone

I have had so many people in various businesses tell me that they do not need email encryption. That Email hacking is not a serious or meaningful threat.

For their sake and their correspondents’ sake, I hope that they are right but perhaps, just perhaps, they are wrong as my experience shows below.

A couple of months back I opened a trading account at a brokerage firm that has been on Barron’s top ten firms for a long time. I liked their service and their trading platform and went ahead with the application. During the application process, lo and behold their customer service representative sent me an email with pages from my filled out application that contained all my sensitive information including my Social Security Number! Now, imagine that email sitting on many email gateways en route and repeat after me with appropriate sarcasm, “No one needs email encryption”.

Yesterday (the event which prompted me to write this) I received an email from the mortgage company doing my refinance that contained my full credit card number. And they were merely forwarding the email that they received from Equifax (the credit score company). So Equifax originated an email with my name and full credit card number and sent it out by plain old email without protecting it! One would think that Equifax of all the companies in the world would understand the need to protect sensitive information. One would be wrong because Equifax thinks, “No one needs email encryption”.

Moral of the story: Either diligently avoid sending private sensitive information by email or protect it with encryption. Doing neither is just being negligent.

Tags: Encryption | email encryption | privacy-protected email | Secure email