How to deal with Confidentiality and Data Privacy with an Overseas VA? - Practical Advice

How do you deal with confidentiality and privacy issues with a virtual assistant? Hey, my name is John Jonas and I want to talk about confidentiality and privacy and data privacy when you're hiring a virtual assistant in the Philippines. So a lot of you aren't really going to like my answer to this, but you're a lot less likely to have problems with someone in the Philippines than you are with someone in the U.S. i mean, think about this. Someone's in your office. You can control what computer they sit at, but you can't control them taking a picture with their cell phone of the screen and taking that data and stealing it. You can control them putting it onto a USB stick, but it's pretty easy to do it anyway. You can pretty. It's so easy to steal information today even if someone's local in your office. So in the Philippines there's a culture of knowing this is really wrong and they don't do it very often. In fact, I've seen this so few times where they want to steal something like data or your ideas or some confidential stuff that it's almost non existent when they're working for a foreigner. The law is very strict in the Philippines about this. So now let me give you some solutions because I know there's a lot of industries where you don't have a choice. It doesn't matter what you think about how honest people are. Like HIPAA laws are required for you to do things. So number one, you can easily have someone in the Philippines work inside of your network, set up a virtual private network where they're logging into your computers and then they're working on the computer in your office. It's the same thing as if they were sitting there. They have no other, they have no more access than if they were actually sitting there. Number two, you can easily set up a contract with them where you have a contract with someone in the US you have a contract with someone in the Philippines and you can have them sign a non disclosure agreement and a non compete agreement. It's super, super easy to do that and it's probably as effective in the Philippines as is in the US to have that signed. Number three, set clear boundaries. If you set very clear standards and you talk about those things on a normal basis, they'll be very likely to obey them in the end. You can't prevent all problems. It doesn't, you can't prevent it in the US and you can't prevent it in the Philippines. It's just that in the Philippines they have less incentive to steal from you than they do here in the us it's not likely that they're going to have access to a black market to steal the information that you have and to go sell it. It's not likely that they're going to steal your product IDs and your listings if you're selling E commerce and go set it up on their own. They don't want to do that. They're not entrepreneurial. They don't want to steal your ideas or your business. In the Philippines, once they have a job, they really want to keep that job. And so they're willing to obey the strictness and they're willing to obey data privacy and security and confidentiality measures in order to keep that job. So it's actually quite a bit more secure in the Philippines than it is in the US or in Australia where someone has a $12 an hour job. They don't really care. They'll go get another $12 an hour job. That's not the case the Philippines. When they have a four or five $600 a month gig and you're paying them full for full time work and they're stable and they understand it's long term, they really want to keep that job and do not want to mess it up. My name is John Jonas and in my book the Outsourcing Lever, I talk through all kinds of cultural advantages of why hire in the Philippines? That's available@outsourcinglever.com it's free and it's about 100 pages. It'll take you a couple hours to get through and you'll know so much about about how to make this easy for you again. John Jonas OutsourcingLever.com Go get it.