As the Village Movement and Helpful Village grows, we wanted to take a moment and talk about how important security is. Our team here at Helpful Village prides itself on our security infrastructure and the steps we take to make sure your Village and its members' data is safe.
We have a concern about the fact that there is no official standard for security within the Village Movement as of right now. Our team here at Helpful Village believes that there are some basic security measures for the Village movement that should be agreed among all current and future vendors.
When Village members are putting sensitive information into a Village’s site, they are trusting that their information is being protected and we, as platforms, owe our members that assurance.
A Village and its members have a right to have all forms of a Village’s pages, public and private, to be encrypted and protected.
Let’s establish two fundamental principles:
Security should not be an option and needs to be a must-have for all online Village platforms.Charging for security is not acceptable. In any form. We cannot afford to have unprotected Villages.
For instance, here is tip #1:
- Go to your homepage and look for ‘SECURE | HTTPS://’. If any pages on your site show ‘Not Secure’ on the browser, that’s a problem.
- Call your vendor and ask them to activate HTTPS for all pages. If they ask you to pay, say no, encryption of communications should be at no additional cost.
If you are interested in more security tips, feel free to join our Village Security Interest Group.
There are many things that the Village Movement can do to improve security, but there is one thing that we cannot do, which is ignore the threat of a data breach.
Let’s make sure no Village gets Equixfax-d.
Make sure you know the basics about security.