Please check out the podcast episode. It’s only a minute.

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Personally Identifiable Information (PII) includes: name, address, email, phone, social security number, employer number, spouse/child info, etc.

No matter how convenient it may be:

• Do not email spreadsheets and data files with consumer information to clients or vendors. Data should be encrypted with a password and uploaded to a secure, password-protected transfer site (FTP, DataExchange, etc.)
• Do not take home data files to work on (or email them to yourself).
• Do not email login credentials to your clients. It’s safer to email the URL and leave a voice message with the username/password.

Whenever possible:

• Challenge your clients when they want to collect more information than is necessary to fulfill a promotion. Example: Collecting a postal address or phone number is not necessary if the brand never intends to mail anything to the consumer or contact them by phone. ZIP Code alone is sufficient for geographic targeting.
• Educate your clients when they ask you to do such things you know to be bad business practices. We see so much turnover on the client side; and I’ve spoken with many junior managers that don’t understand the issues and tend to be careless due to ignorance and lack of proper training.
• Report your clients to their superior. You should never compromise best practices due to client pressure.
• Learn about your clients privacy practices so you can work with them as an effective marketing partner, not a vendor.

Our larger clients tend to have Privacy Officers and procedural policies. But the reality is their line managers are under extreme pressure to get things done and will cut corners at times.

Please don’t be cavalier about it. A simple mistake can put a client relationship at risk and cause unrepairable harm to a brand’s reputation.

-Roland

Have an opinion? Please add your comment to this article.

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The letter also says: “We do not believe any of your medical data was on the computer.” That’s not definite. It’s possible, but they are not sure.

My wife and I are outraged. No explanation was given as to why an employee is taking home our confidential information on a laptop.

Careless procedures and a casual attitude have needlessly exposed my family to risk and extra burden now. This is a betrayal of trust. Horizon can never earn that back.

These large companies insist on collecting unnecessary information about you. A health insurance company has no need for any person’s social security number, period! The Social Security Number is for social security and tax reporting and is not a universal ID number. Now Horizon has carelessly lost the data and put 300,000+ people at risk.

I’ve seen this kind of sloppy behavior repeatedly at the mega brand companies I’ve worked with. The PR department says one thing. The Privacy Officer says another thing. Then the line managers ignore the policies because they’re under pressure to get their work done.

The Health Insurance companies bully us around and all we do is bend over and take it.

So, since I cherish the virtues of social media, I roared as any good consumer will. Do something good and I’ll tell two friends. Burn me and I’ll tell twenty.

So I sent emails to my local papers and news radio station. I posted my opinions on blogs. I twittered about it. (Hmm, I feel one or two podcast episodes might be next.)

Now I’ll put my marketer hat on. It occurred to me to watch closely how this company will react over the next few days/weeks doing damage control. Not due to my efforts, but hopefully the combined efforts of many frustrated customers.

Then again, Horizon might just blow everyone off with a obligatory 12-month membership to credit monitoring (thanks for the extra hassle) to make us go away quietly.

Funny thing is as soon as I published my blog posts, the banner ads on the site were all suddenly about getting affordable insurance from Horizon. If Horizon was smart, they’d shut their campaign off for awhile, or replace it with ads that soften the negative press.

I’ll let you know what I observe.

Related Links:

• Horizon says stolen laptop had customers’ information

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