Feature Friday: highlight privacy-sensitive information in emails

The Smartlockr Intelligent Data Protection Platform enables secure communication. This means safe email, safe file sharing and safe communication within a secure environment. To keep you informed of all developments, we share a new or renewed feature every Friday in our “Feature Friday”. Today we have an extension to an existing functionality that is currently being worked on: highlighting privacy-sensitive information in an email concept . We are happy to explain how this works exactly.

Human error remains the biggest cause of data breaches. Fortunately, you can do something about this. Raising awareness plays a major role in this . 
Read more: why awareness is important for secure communication.

Notifications on sensitive content

Smartlockr uses Machine Learning to prevent the risk of data leaks: by cleverly applying this technique, the system can recognize privacy-sensitive information in an email, without us having access to the content of the message. This is done with content settings, which are linked to the content policy. Every organization can indicate which type of information is privacy-sensitive and needs extra attention.

Imagine: within your organization you work a lot with credit card information that you process in your emails. You want each sender that includes this information in their emails to be aware that privacy sensitive information is being sent. Smartlockr works with content filters that alert users that sensitive information is being processed. In the case of credit card information, Smartlockr has this notification enabled by default. This means that there is always a notification when the standard 16-digit credit card note is entered . If there is content specific to your organization that you would like to receive notifications about, such as records of patients or clients, you can add it as an administrator.

This way, we are able to increase the awareness of the sender.

Highlighting of information within a concept

A notification prompts when processing sensitive information before you send an email, which contributes to secure emailing and increases awareness. 

We do not stop here, we are constantly evolving and updating Smartlockr! We are developing an extension to this feature so it can be more focused and specific. Currently, the sender is shown one notification, regardless of whether it contains one or multiple sensitive components. However, it is not yet clear where exactly this information has been processed. The extension to come is to highlight the information in the email concept. This means that while composing an email, the sender can see where sensitive information has been processed. This has the great advantage that the sender has a good view of where sensitive information is. Marking content is therefore implemented to keep the sender extra alert and to give a better overview of where sensitive information is.