This week (3-9 May 2021) is Privacy Awareness Week.

At Laminar, we primarily deal with corporates, schools, government departments and the like.  Most have a professional staff or team that manage the IT systems and their information.  We help these people with their cyber security and other IT requirements.  Some of these organisations struggle with cyber security and have suffered economically along the way.

We all however, hear stories about individuals who lose money or control of their identity because of scammers, criminals and plethora of bad actors.  Fortunately its easier for the individual than a large enterprise to protect themselves.

A critical part of protect yourself is to be careful where you leave your personal information.  I talk about the “Rush to Trust” that people exhibit when using that new cool App, without regard to the information they load up and where it is stored.

To help individuals in a small way we have created LamChat which is a messaging service to rival WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal and others.  One of the key differences is that your data stays in Australia and in the control of a local!  So if you are sharing family information for example and you use LamChat then that information wont be used to market to you or be cross correlated with your WEB searches and user data on the phone.  If you are introducing your children or elders to messaging why give your family secrets to a corporation overseas?  If you run a small business you could use LamChat to send sensitive information to your accountants or lawyers also.

We also support the Privacy Awareness Week activity of the Office of the Australian Information Commission (OAIC) which kicks off this week.  I highly recommend reading the simple tips on that web site.  Keep an eye out for #PAW2021. https://www.oaic.gov.au/s/paw2021/