What HR can do to Protect Employee Privacy

Protecting employee privacy: A new, vital role for HR departments

Today's competitive employment market environment offers employees a lot of options to pick and choose the organizations they want to work for. Many organizations choose to showcase their value by offering employees extra benefits, such as robust employee privacy tools to combat the scourge of cybercrime.

HR departments are well positioned to manage and administer that process. Due to their extensive knowledge about their employees and the personal data that they have shared, HR often finds itself enabling employees to safeguard their digital privacy better while successfully mitigating the company's security risks.

The digital-first nature of today's workplace means that we all generate huge amounts of data every day, which is easily lost, shared, or stolen.

Wouldn't it be nice to know that your HR department is enabling employees to safeguard their digital privacy, using cutting-edge online tools that track your most important data and take action when it's found to be stolen?

Identity theft fraud undermines productivity

Identity theft often has a devastating effect on an employee's ability to perform their functions, costing them hours in lost productivity and confidence, not to mention their financial security.

Recently, an IDX member living in Oregon related the story of how she began getting calls from Michigan about unpaid cable bills that were piling up in her name...from a state she'd never even visited! After a few hours of online detective work, she found that her credit rating had fallen extremely low, thanks to many unresolved issues with a cable provider. Four accounts had been opened in her name and accumulated more than $3000 in debt!

She lost many hours trying to do the tedious work of pulling herself out of this debt and regaining her financial stability and good credit rating. It had a negative effect on her performance at work, and her confidence to perform basic online operations. She explains that it was when she discovered that she was eligible for identity protection and recovery with IDX and was connected with the right intake person at IDX, that 'it was like the first sigh of relief that I had had in a very long time.'

This story illustrates just how debilitating it can be for employees to have to combat online fraud by themselves.

How IDX privacy protection can protect your employees

IDX is a global leader in data breach response services and identity and privacy protection services, offering peace of mind from today's multitude of cyber risks.

Everything we do is designed for the rigorous security standards of Fortune 500 companies and to operate at the highest levels of government standards.

The digital world can (and should be) a safer place than it is today.

It's time for organizations to take simple, practical steps that enable digital privacy protection for employees and help them to monitor and thwart any attacks that threaten them and/or their identity.

The IDX Privacy Platform is a single-source solution for a myriad of privacy concerns facing organizations and consumers alike. The tools we have developed over years of research are perfectly suited to the job and can be implemented by HR departments quickly and easily.

Let's run through a few of the services that your employee will have access to:

Cyberscan - Monitor the dark web looking for personal data.

One of IDX's most popular features, Cyberscan monitors the dark web to see whether personal information has been commoditized in any way. Individuals can choose the type of data that they are looking for (e.g. Social Security number, email address, bank account number), then label it as either financial, personal, or medical data and click Submit and the engine begins trawling the dark web looking for personal data.

Knowledge is power and once employees know their data is out there and compromised, then they can do something about it.

Password Manager - Easily secure all passwords with advanced privacy tools.

The loss and theft of weak passwords amongst employees is probably the most common reason for a data breach. Nearly nine out of ten data breaches happen due to human error. IDX Password Manager provides guidance and oversees employees' need for better, more effective password hygiene.

Tracking Blocker - Control who can track an individual's online behavior and when.

It should come as no surprise to learn that online advertisers do everything they can to track people's online behavior and learn what products and services individuals would be amenable to, and then serve them as regularly as possible. The more they know about the individual, the more value the person has.

The Tracking Blocker function, once installed, monitors the web pages that you visit, and tells you how many trackers are active and present on that page.

ForgetMe Data Removal - The best way to get personal data out of the data broker sites

IDX software kicks into action the moment that any employee's private information is found on data broker sites. Not only does it inform the client of the discovery, but it initiates the process of removing personal data from 100+ data broker sites and monitoring the breach site thereafter.

The confidence of a tried and tested IDX solution

Providing a secure online environment for your employees has never been more important, and easier to do, particularly in the age of remote work where employees often work without the umbrella of corporate security, and must rely on their own instincts to stay safe.

Getting started is easy. We streamline platform integration, program rollout, and customer communication in a few simple steps using the robust and feature-rich APIs we developed. By utilizing the latest in microservices architecture, IDX delivers an easy-to-use, highly scalable, and secure environment with minimal downtime.

Extra precautions should be taken to protect the remote worker’s private information from cyber threats.

One important step you can begin with is ensuring that the devices used in remote work are connected to the internet via ethernet rather than WiFi when possible. Alternatively, if WiFi must be used, the employee should be coached about setting up a virtual private network (VPN) to ensure their data is encrypted and secure when they are working remotely.

Taking that vital first step

Don't tell your employees that you value them, show them.

By offering world-class privacy solutions to your employees, you're providing a safe, nurturing online environment that will enable them to do their best work and give everything online, safe in the knowledge that they are not exposing their own data to bad actors out there looking to exploit weakness.

So if you're ready for offering your employees the safety net of data privacy and protection, then you can get started with our easy ForgetMe trial to see for yourself how well IDX will work for you.