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With the amount of data breaches that have happened lately, it’s undeniable that it can rock customers’ trust and confidence in a company – along with the company’s bottom line.

According to the TRUSTe 2014 U.S. Customer Confidence Privacy Report, 89 percent of consumers say they avoid companies they do not trust to protect their information.

It’s essential that bank employees balance their need to use customer information to conduct business transactions with meeting and exceeding customer privacy expectations. Customers respect companies that take extra measures (those they see and those they don’t) to protect their personal information.

“Visual privacy,” protects customer information from visual hacking: a low-tech method used to visually capture sensitive, confidential and private information for unauthorized use.  Visual hacking could be achieved when a worker’s log-in credentials are seen by a malicious party and used to access sensitive information or by snapping a photo on a cell phone of confidential company spreadsheets or presentations.

Here are some key ways to protect your organization from visual hacking:

  • Take into account what information absolutely needs to be collected, retained and displayed to employees
  • Include visual privacy in company policies and standards
  • Educate employees about good visual privacy practices, the threat of visual hacking and other low-tech attacks, and create an ongoing communication plan
  • Enact a “clean desk policy” for workers with desks in open areas
  • Take visual privacy into account when designing customer interaction locations
  • Outfit computer monitors and device screens in open spaces with privacy filters and screen protectors
  • Proactively complete routine situation and site analyses to use as awareness tools

Be vigilant.  It only takes one piece of visually hacked confidential information, such as an employee’s log-in credentials written on a piece of paper left on a desk or seen on a screen – to launch a large-scale data breach of customer information.

To read the entire article, please visit www.bankinfosecurity.com.