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LegalPrinters and copiers store, send and leave behind sensitive information. Six practical fixes for Alberta offices, clinics and firms.
Scott Townsend, UrFleet, Edmonton
Most businesses lock down laptops and email, then forget the machine in the hallway that copies, scans, faxes and prints every sensitive document they have. A modern multifunction printer is a networked computer with a hard drive, and it deserves the same care.
Alberta's privacy laws expect businesses to protect personal information with reasonable safeguards, whether that's PIPA for private businesses, the Health Information Act for clinics, or the Protection of Privacy Act for public bodies like school boards. Here's where printers usually fall short, and what to do about each.
Payroll, patient files and client letters sit in the output tray until someone wanders over. Anyone walking by can pick them up.
Fix: turn on secure print release. Jobs wait in a queue and only print when the person who sent them taps a badge or enters a PIN at the device.
Many copiers store images of what they scan and copy. When a lease ends, that drive can leave your building with the machine.
Fix: make sure drive encryption is on while the device is in use, and get written confirmation that the drive is securely wiped or removed before any device leaves.
Plenty of printers still run with the factory admin password, which means anyone on your network can change settings, redirect scans or read the address book.
Fix: set a unique admin password on every device and keep firmware up to date.
When scan-to-folder breaks, staff start emailing scans to themselves, sometimes to personal accounts.
Fix: set up scanning properly, straight into the right shared folder, document system or EMR, and test it after every IT change.
Clinics, law firms and pharmacies still rely on fax, and incoming faxes often print to a machine nobody watches.
Fix: route incoming faxes to a secure digital inbox, or at least to a device in a staff-only area.
If no one owns your printers, no one notices when firmware is years out of date or a device starts behaving oddly.
Fix: put every device under monitoring, so updates, errors and supplies are someone's job.
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