Privacy settings

The most common concerns for users when they first get introduced to the email capture functionality in AffinityLive surround privacy. While most companies have policies restricting workplace email use to be only for work related correspondence, in almost allenvironments staff use company email to correspond with family, friends and loved ones, and are understandably concerned about the privacy of this correspondence.

The confidentiality between two staff members or a contact and a staff member is only second in importance to your business. For this reason we have allowed you to create relationships between staff, contacts or groups. You can group staff together and allow them specific access to just a company or to specific contacts. Or you can specify one staff member and restrict access to a contact, client or series of activities. We reccommend this for your primary way of controlling the privacy of your interactions as it can cover an entire group of staff, clients or companies.

Read more about relatioships here.

1. Email addresses need to match contacts Domain name 

For 99% of personal correspondence, the fact that AffinityLive only captures emails where the sender, the recipient or the domain name are stored within the contact is sufficient to safeguard user privacy. If you email your mum or your friend, and they're not in AffinityLive's database of email addresses, then the email won't be captured into a an activity, and no-one will be able to see your correspondence.

2. All activities can be changed to private or confidential status by owners

For the occasions when you have email correspondence which you want to mark as confidential or private, you can easily change the status of the an activity through the "visibility" menu area to be Confidential or Private. Importantly, when you set an activity to be confidential or private, all activities in that conversation - future replies, for example - are marked with the same level of restriction, so if you want to keep a conversation confidential or private, setting the visibility of the first activity you send out of AffinityLive will ensure the rest of the conversation is kept restricted too.

Confidential

This is where other users can see that a piece of correspondence occurred by viewing a an activity list, however, the content of the activity - the subject, the body, etc - isn't visible at all to other users. All they see is CONFIDENTIAL in the subject, the idea being that they can come and ask you what the correspondence was about if they are undertaking account management activities and need to have a clear understanding of what's been said to the client across the whole organisation. This setting is commonly appropriate for interactions between the senior management and an external law firm or accounting firm, where the contents is either legally privileged or other sensitive communications that shouldn't be seen by anyone else in the organisation.

Private

This is where other users have absolutely no idea there was any correspondence with the client (and only the clients) - the email isn't listed, visible or searchable to any users other than the person who sent or received the an activity. Only the user who sent or recieved the an activity can view it in any context - list, search result or viewing it normally. If you then decide to include another contact for that company in the private activity, it will continue to make the replies and everything under that private too. This gives the user who created the activity lots of control over who can see the activity thread.

This setting is commonly appropriate for interactions between the staff members and their spouse or loved one. While normally these sorts of contacts wouldn't be in AffinityLive at all, it is possible that your organisation would do business with your spouse or someone else who you have a close personal relationship with, making this sort of privacy setting appropriate. 

3. Professional users can store default privacy & confidentiality settings

One of the benefits of being a Professional user in AffinityLive is that you're able to define these sorts of privacy 'defaults' between yourself and the contacts in AffinityLive. By setting up a relationship with a Contact which is Confidential or Private, the activities that are captured automatically in AffinityLive will have the chosen level of privacy attached by default, saving you the time and effort of going in and manually changing privacy settings.

 4. Admin users are warned about contacts with staff email addresses

If a contact is created inside AffinityLive with an email address that looks like a staff email address, then your admin users will be warned.

For example, your staff all have emails that end with @acmecorp.com - if anyone creates a contact with a similar email address, such as payroll@acmecorp.com, then when payroll sends emails to your staff (or vice-versa), those emails would start being captured against the payroll contact (assuming you have email integration configured). So to avoid the risk of capturing sensitive employee details, your admin users will be warned about the creation of such contacts, and can administrate as necessary.