Kjag wrote:I have a question for you: I work in Healthcare, for which there are very strict privacy guidelines called HIPAA regulations. Occasionally I receive faxes that contain protected health information elements. With a regular phone line fax, the information is not stored in any media and therefore not retrievable by unauthorized entities. My question is, if I use this new fax service with Sonic, I assume the faxes go through your server and are converted to a PDF file - so does the protected information leave a "footprint" in your server which potentially could fall into the wrong hands? Actually, aside from healthcare privacy issues, if I fax something with my social security number or bank account info on it, what are the risks? Thanks.
Incoming faxes are converted to PDF and placed in your mail spool. If somebody were to compromise your email account's password, they would have access to your faxes so long as they remain on our servers. Because we take snapshots of our customers' mail spools roughly once every four hours, once daily, and once weekly (for backup data retrieval purposes), it is possible to unintentionally leave a fax on the server for up to two weeks, or to intentionally leave a fax on the server indefinitely.
Kelsey could comment on this authoritatively, but I do not believe we store outbound fax data beyond the necessary caching during the transmission itself (much like how your normal fax machine needs to temporarily store the data while sending).
I consider our servers to be low-risk, but have no useful knowledge of the privacy guidelines you are working with. Erring on the side of caution with privileged information is a good position to start from.
