Why Every Organization Needs a Privacy-First eSigning Solution

Global connectivity is a two-sided coin: It’s great for businesses because they can – in theory – acquire customers anywhere in the world, depending on the product or service they’re selling. But on the flip side, those same customers can now also choose from any provider in the world, making for tough competition. 

The more your business communicates with customers digitally, and the more you work on carving your niche in your industry, the more important it becomes to adopt a privacy-first mindset. Because without it, thousands of competitors could gain insight into not only who you’re working with but also learn about your USP and how to copy it. 

Without a privacy-first eSigning solution offering proper end-to-end encryption, your business is at risk: If there is any way to circumvent encryption and breach the privacy of your documents, you’re only ever one step away from being fully exposed to anyone with internet access.

And while the source of the issues is simple – the lack of a focus on privacy, usually resulting in mediocre or no encryption at all – the resulting threats are manifold. 

Here Is Why Anything but a Privacy-First eSigning Solution Poses a Serious Threat to Your Business

Privacy in the analog world is one thing: Hire trustworthy employees and make anyone else sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). In a world increasingly moving online for most forms of communication, though, privacy becomes a whole new issue to consider. 

By definition, documents containing a legal signature are often confidential or at least of a sensitive nature. And while moving away from wet signatures and towards eSignatures provides huge benefits in terms of convenience and efficiency, choosing the wrong eSignature provider can come at a cost that far outweighs those benefits. 

Privacy with documents is achieved through encryption – proper, end-to-end encryption. Without this, there are loopholes in the process that can be exploited, no matter the level of security promised. 

Without an eSigning solution that ensures your privacy by using proper encryption, your documents are exposed on the internet unencrypted at some stage. Whether that’s only while in transit to your eSigning provider’s servers or for a few minutes sitting on those servers until they are encrypted, the result is the same: If there is access to be gained, someone can read (and potentially copy) all of your sensitive information. 

And those are not the only two weak points that can be exploited: Online transmissions are becoming more and more complex almost daily, without the average user having any knowledge of how and where exactly the data is stored. It, therefore, becomes almost impossible to keep track of all the loopholes that present a real danger to the privacy of sensitive documents. 

Here’s Why a Privacy-First eSigning Solution Is the Only Viable Option for Any Business

Did you think your digital documents travel straight from the sender to the recipient, only stopping briefly on your eSigning provider’s servers? Think again. 

Without proper end-to-end Encryption…	What that means for your data privacy
Your WiFi network becomes a threat	Anyone close to you can read your documents
Your favorite WFH coffee shop is a risk	The owner now has access to all your data
Your ISP could be listening in	You can’t send any documents without your ISP knowing the contents
Your government could read all your documents	Potentially sensitive information ends up in an endless web of bureaucracy
Your government’s allies could access all your unencrypted data	Your documents could end up unencrypted halfway across the globe
Your eSigning provider can read all your documents	You’ll never know which employees are reading your documents
You could be exposed by a cyberattack of your eSigning provider	You could become the victim of blackmail
Your recipients’ setup becomes a liability	You can never be sure your transmission is truly secure

Those steps are quite common in the process of digitally sending a document for signature. Which one of them presents the biggest threat to you? Let’s dig in. 

Your home or business WiFi may not be as private as you think it is

Can you be sure your Wifi is secure and cannot be intercepted? Chances are you’re using a commercially available WiFi router, most of which nowadays broadcast a strong WiFi signal to cover a large area. Unfortunately, this also likely includes your neighbors or offices next door – or the guy sitting in a car on the street in front of your house or office. And given how easy and cheap it is to crack the average WiFi network, this fact should be a concern. 

Anyone in your immediate vicinity could be listening in on your internet traffic. And if that traffic includes unencrypted documents with potentially sensitive information, this could lead to a very uncomfortable situation at best and a serious threat at worst. 

Your coffee shop may not be very privacy-focused

Working from a coffee shop provides a welcome change to the current work-from-home environment – but the price for that change could be higher than you think. If you’re connecting to any kind of external WiFi, be that your local coffee shop or the airport lounge while you wait to board your flight, you’re trusting whoever provides that connection to safeguard your data and respect your privacy. 

What could the owner of the coffee shop do with every single piece of information you’ve ever sent across their WiFi connection? While it’s an unlikely scenario, the answer to this question carries so much weight it’s certainly an issue worth considering.

Your internet service provider (ISP) may be listening in

Laws surrounding internet privacy change constantly, and you may just find yourself using an ISP that is allowed to listen in on your traffic. And while you may think that a lack of online privacy is mainly a concern for less democratic, less developed countries, think again: ISPs in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain are all known to have laws that can seriously threaten the digital privacy of their users. 

Do you really trust your internet provider? And even if you do, the old saying rings true: Trust is good, proof is better. Only by opting for a proper, end-to-end encrypted eSigning provider can you have proof that there is no breach of privacy – ever.

Your government may keep taps on you

As an extension of what ISPs are allowed to collect, government agencies themselves often have ample power to intercept and collect data on their citizens. And while this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it only takes minimal research to unearth some rather concerning facts about online privacy in even the most advanced of countries. 

Are you willing to share all your sensitive documents with your government? Even assuming you trust your government – which you should – your private documents should still be yours and yours alone. Your business is operating within the law and therefore should have no mandatory exposure to one of any number of government agencies.

Other governments may join the party

If your government is allowed to track your online movements, chances are that other “friendly” governments can do so as well. There have been long-standing agreements like the infamous 5, 9, or 14 eyes, respectively, essentially allowing the free sharing of intelligence information between the governments involved. Even more explicit agreements like the CLOUD Act specifically outline that user data can – or must – be shared between governments if a “legitimate request” exists. 

Even if you trust your government – do you trust all their allies? Looking at the list of the “14 eyes”, how do you feel about every single one of those governments potentially gaining access to your most sensitive documents, including trade secrets and confidential contracts?

Your eSigning provider may access your documents…

Unless you’re making it impossible to access your documents by ever storing them unencrypted, chances are someone at your provider will access them. That could be by accident – all it takes is a click on the wrong button – or by intention, citing fine print like the “rule of least privilege”, which gives legal access to employees with the right credentials. 

Once stored with your eSigning provider, control over your documents is out of your hands. It does not matter if you can move, copy, modify or delete them – once they’re stored unencrypted, they can be accessed before you’d ever know.

…or they could get hacked

Even if your eSigning provider respects your privacy, they’re still a target for hackers. Especially being that, by definition, eSigning providers store a lot of potentially sensitive information, there is a huge digital mark on the back of each and every one. A single successful hack could prove worth millions of dollars in ransom fees, blackmailing the users with releasing their most sensitive data to the public. 

There is no bulletproof cyber security. A hack is – statistically speaking – not a question of “if”, but rather “when”. And the bigger, bolder, more prominent your provider is, the more likely they are to attract unwanted attention. 

Bonus: Everything above in reverse order

Your end may be safe – but what about the person you’re sending the documents to? They could be in another country – do you trust their government? How does their ISP handle online privacy? And where exactly are they sitting when they receive your documents – are they using a secure internet connection? 

Even if you can control the circumstances on your end, you’ll never be able to control the situation of your recipient. And all it takes is one little issue in their setup to seriously threaten the privacy of your sensitive information.

The Bottom Line

Privacy should be the top priority of your eSigning provider. Not only because they present a threat themselves, either by allowing employees to access your documents legally or by becoming the victim of cybercrime – but also because they only represent a small step in the entire chain of communications their service offers. 

Therefore, even if your eSigning provider does encrypt your documents once they receive them, that’s a partial solution to the problem at best: It still leaves your data exposed before and after it touches their servers. And unless you physically work on their infrastructure alone, that’ll always be the case. 

Luckily, the solution to all these problems is straightforward: It’s called asymmetric, full end-to-end encryption. Using this latest method of document encryption, any data gets encrypted on your local machine before it ever leaves, and the unique (hence asymmetric) key is sent directly to the recipient to decrypt the data. This way, any and all issues analyzed above are solved once and for all because no matter who tries to read your documents at what stage of the process, they are encrypted – full stop. 

The same goes for your recipient: It does not matter where they read the documents or what their local laws offer in terms of digital privacy. Even if they use the public WiFi at the local Starbucks and live in a country that blatantly logs all internet traffic – all that’s ever visible are heavily encrypted documents with no decryption key in sight. 

So ask yourself: Can your current eSigning solution be considered privacy-first? If the answer is no – and anything but asymmetric end-to-end encryption is a hard no – you may want to take a step back and rethink the process. Because no matter how small the risk, it’s simply not worth taking when it comes to protecting your privacy.