As many people adjust to the reality of working from home, we find ourselves in a situation that we largely didn’t anticipate: seemingly everyone else doing the same thing. In the past, a day or two here or there doing Zoom meetings or conference calls was interesting, anomalous, and largely ad hoc, so there wasn’t much need to think about how to structure a day around it. But now, and for the forseeable future, it seems that remote is going to be a dominant form of working for many, particularly in the finance, service, legal, and healthcare industries. Which means that the volume of business and commercial data transmitted, used, discussed, and exposed is going to vastly increase — how could it not, when an in-office chat has now become a group FaceTime call?
At its best, remote working is a remarkable, and remarkably helpful, tool for keeping business going in the midst of a crisis, and beyond. But now that it has become so much more common, it’s absolutely crucial to implement the meaningful controls over data, confidentiality, and information flows that would’ve been in place at an office. Privacy laws and duties of care don’t go away simply because we’re working from home, now, and so the ad hoc character of WFH is going to need a lot more structure.
In order to provide guidance to firms dealing with employees newly working remote, or with the general privacy risks of going primarily online, we’ve created a guide for general principles around privacy in a remote environment. No guide, of course, can cover all relevant circumstances or risks, but this is at least a starting point for you, a way to consider the most important aspects of privacy at a time when it might not be top of mind. Send an email to us at info@wardpllc.com and we’ll send the guide to you. And if you have follow up questions, we’ll gather the most frequently posed and answer them as best we can in a follow-on email later this week.
The goal is for the guide and our answer session to help you move through this transitional period with more confidence and more focus on privacy. We know that this is a stressful time, and so good advice is more in demand than ever: that’s why the guide is free. Our hope is that we can help you negotiate the most difficult parts of setting up (remote) shop and that you’ll weather the crisis with your full team intact, and everyone healthy.
