3M Privacy White Paper

The risks around visual privacy, mobile security and illegal misuse of confidential or sensitive information continues to be a hot topic for UK organizations. However, while there seems to be considerable concern around the potential implications, a variety of research, reports and anecdotal evidence suggests that organizations are finding it difficult to address these risk areas.

Developing a robust security and privacy strategy is inevitably a multi-faceted task, involving mitigation of risk at different levels of the security landscape. One area that is gaining increasing focus is ensuring better visual privacy, or in other words, reducing the risk of ‘visual hacking’, both in the office (especially in open-plan areas) and among mobile workers.

Research in which 3M itself has been involved demonstrates the size of the risk. Most recent is the Open Spaces surveyed conducted by the Ponemon Institute, which found that 9 out of 10 people questioned had caught someone looking at data on their laptops in public.