Why you need to clean up your computer right now

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If you work with a computer (as you probably do), you almost certainly handle a lot of documents: some financial, some technical, some confidential. And then there are the perhaps hundreds of e-mail messages that arrive every day. However careful you are, there’s likely to have been at least one occasion when you sent a message (with or without documents attached) to the wrong recipient.

In security terms, that’s a data leak. A study we carried out last year found that about one in three leaks results in someone getting fired. But leaks can occur not only because someone sent important documents to the wrong person, but also because of bad access settings. That kind of problem is what we address in this post — seen not through the eyes of the employer, but rather from the point of view of an ordinary employee tasked with handling documents without causing problems.

So, here are a few tips to help you stay on the right side of data clutter — and avoid causing a data leak at work.

Don’t take work home

When you don’t have time to finish something during working hours, the logical thought is to take it home. But consider that in addition to the traditional argument about striking a healthy work/life balance, good security practice cautions against it.

At the office, security is the responsibility of your company’s IT security team, which implements all sorts of policies and uses services that keep data securely stored, computers protected, and so on. Services for companies are usually more secure and configurable than are apps and services for individual users. For example, in OneDrive for Business, Microsoft employs several levels of data encryption and lets companies block the sharing of documents with all and sundry. OneDrive for ordinary users has no such features.

The upshot is that if a data leak occurs because of bad security policies or because your work computer is insufficiently protected, the security team is to blame, not you.

But as soon as you take work home or start using external services for storing work documents, you’re taking full responsibility for the security of this information and for ensuring that it does not fall into the wrong hands. And there is no shortage of ways in which this information can get lost or accidentally spilled.

The possibilities run deep. For example, a link-shared Google Docs can be seen not only by the recipients, but by search engines. Or someone might steal your non-password-protected laptop. Or someone could connect to your smartphone through a USB charging port at the airport.

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