Under the Data Protection Act 1998 data controllers are required to take 'appropriate technical and organisational measures against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data'.
In practice information that is transported or sent via email in an unencrypted format goes against this directive. A number of high profile companies have received enforcement notices which specifically detail a failure to encrypt as being a breach of the Data Protection act and Data Protection principles.
Although there is currently no strict legal obligation to encrypt personal data, this can only be a matter of time.
Encryption is important, very. When your encryption solution is as easy to use as R10Cipher, there really is no excuse not to encrypt. Your clients will thank you for it.
The Data Protection Act 1998 regulates how organisations should handle personal data that relates to a living individual who can be identified.
Organisations processing personal data must do so in accordance with eight core principles.
Principle 7: Technical and organisational measures should be taken to prevent unauthorised and unlawful processing, loss or damage to personal data.
Encryption is not specifically mentioned, but is one of the best ways of complying with Principle 7. With R10Cipher compliance is easy, simple and inexpensive.
We used to provide R10Decrypt for this purpose. However with the goal of decreasing the maintenance overhead and making it easier for 'Decrypt Only' customers to upgrade to the full version, you can now use the standard R10Cipher Trial version for this purpose. To remove the Nag Screen and Overlay / Trial Version window, just enter the User Name 'Decrypt Only' into the Preferences window and clear the Serial field. Save the Preferences.
You can encrypt the *contents* of a folder but not the folder itself. In this case first compress or zip the folder then encrypt the resulting file with R10Cipher.
What's Key Management and Why Do I Need It ?
See
this post for an Introduction to Key Management with R10Cipher, here for an explanation of the use of Passwords and Shared Secrets, here for information on Key Creation and Administration and here for Key Retrieval. There is also a Step by Step Guide to Key Management available here.