PDFfiller and Data Security: Protecting Your Online Privacy

You know how important digital security is for you and your data. This year no sector of the economy has been left untouched by data hacks, which have affected organizations ranging from Dairy Queen, to Kickstarter, to Apple. In 2014 alone, a total of 930,526,448 records were breached according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Here at PDFfiller, we take the security of your data seriously and have developed measures to give you data protection on a par with online financial institutions like banks. To start with, we focus on the physical security of your data.  PDFfiller data are stored in Amazon S3 data centers which have multiple backup locations, instant and uninterrupted data access, and military-level physical security.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been assessed and approved by independent auditors as a cloud service provider for security impact levels 1-5 of the Department of Defense’s Cloud Security Model. For more on Amazon’s Web Services and how they work to protect your data, take a look here at the AWS White Paper on Security.  Secondly, we ensure the chain of custody for all data stored on our servers, in transit, and routed through third party service providers. This means that your data is accounted for at all times.

On top of these baseline measures, we’ve developed a few additional features to make sure your data is safe.  Some of you may have noticed that the My Forms page now features an Encrypted Folder. This is a folder secured with a unique password required to access its contents. To activate the Encrypted Folder, select it in My Forms, enter your mobile phone number, and enter the code you receive via text message. You’ll then be asked to create a unique password for the folder, which automatically closes after ten minutes of inactivity.  For more on how the Encrypted Folder operates, check out the video below.

Other important security features include a legally binding verification stamp for your eSignatures (for more on the legality of eSignatures, see our Ultimate Guide to Legal Electronic Signatures), and an Audit Trail feature that lets you keep track of all activity on your PDFfiller account, including document changes, exports and imports. Similarly, Audit Trail gives you an accounting of everyone who logs into your account and which documents they looked at – a privacy feature unique to PDFfiller.  Finally, for those of you in the medical field, PDFfiller also meets HIPAA standards for the security of electronic protected health information.

While we do our utmost to keep you covered, it’s always a good idea to develop security-conscious habits, including remaining vigilant of your various accounts, frequently changing passwords, using password managers that help you remember more complicated and varied passwords, updating your software, and using a two-step verification systems, such as our Encrypted Folder, for added security.  Try out PDFfiller today, and along with more efficient document management, get some peace of mind regarding the safety of your personal data.