A lot of the work that is carried out by audio transcription companies Kunst Heidelberg is confidential; police interviews, disciplinary proceedings, court sessions and so on. What has amazed me as the owner of a transcription agency is how careless some people are with sensitive material, in terms of selecting a provider to complete the work.

Obviously, some work is more confidential than others. Some is confidential simply because it has general personal details in it, or the proceedings are not particularly serious; professionalism demands that such material is treated as privileged, but there is limited potential risk to anybody if it were to be released.

However, there are some things that need to be kept confidential because the material could cause significant harm were it to enter the public domain, or do so prematurely. Over the course of the last couple of years my company has dealt with projects ranging from enquiries in war crimes, extensive medical malpractice investigations, the disciplinary proceedings of a number of high profile people in professional sports, and the deliberations of the leadership of one of the world’s biggest sports.

Because we are a high quality, professional, transcription company there has never been a security breach. That is not to say there has never been an attempt by someone – we have script kiddies trying to break into our website every week – but our file system is entirely separate to the public facing website, so there is never any problem. However, from the perspective of the clients, that seems to be more by luck than judgement.

Clients who need this highly confidential material transcribed very often do little more then pick up our website through Google and give us a call. And that’s it. Nobody has ever asked for us to provide further bona fides or references, and neither has anybody asked for details of the company directors or shareholders, or whether we have ever had any problems. We occasionally get people asking how we store and delete files, but the questions are cursory at best.

To me this seems crazy. If I was looking to get some material transcribed that could cause chaos if it found its way into the hands of the press, I would want to take quite a thorough look at company that was going to be doing it, and how they looked after my material. I would also be unlikely be willing to go ahead if there were not some third party references.

Ultimately, it comes down to time. Virtually without exception, when clients come to use with very sensitive files they are in a rush; there is usually a court or hearing date in the offing, for which they need the transcripts without fail. In such circumstances there is rarely time to get right under the skin of the company – they sign our confidentiality agreement and leave it at that – which is understandable, but wouldn’t be excusable if there was a problem.

I have often described my job as being the Keeper of Secrets, though the bulk of what we do is not in the confidential category. There isn’t really an easy solution from the perspective of the client – there is rarely anything they can do about being in a rush – so it falls to the transcription company to behave impeccably at all times, and ensure that there are no stings in the tale for the customer.

What is interesting – and I am not a lawyer so I am far into the realms of speculation – is how that related to the data protection legislation. I doubt that turning over highly sensitive material to a relatively unknown transcription contractor is legally compliant. I hope we never have to explore that question too fully.