I know a few of you use the Jott service to capture ideas on the go. If you do, you're familiar with the Daily Jott e-mails. I enjoy quickly reviewing my Daily Jott, but this morning I ran into a slight problem.

I received a Daily Jott e-mail as I do every day, but today's Daily Jott belonged to another user. Somehow, someone else's Jotts had been mistakenly delivered to my mailbox. The Jotts I received were full of personal client information - names, phone numbers, policy numbers, and the like.

I immediately contacted Jott and forwarded them the e-mail. This afternoon I received a response from Jott ensuring me that my own data had not been distributed and that this was the result of a test system malfunction. I'm not a techie, nor do I know how Jott routes its data to its users, but I was told that this event affected only one user. Jott took the issue very seriously, shut down the offending system, and notified the user. I appreciate how quickly they took care of this problem, and informed me of what they did.

It was a reminder to me that, regardless of privacy policies, encryption, or other methods of safeguarding personal data, errors do happen. We should be cautious of the data we may be providing to others. I've been debating whether Jott's many benefits now outweigh its privacy concerns. The jury's still out on that one, but in the mean time, I just wanted to remind everyone to play it safe with their data. Ultimately, you don't know who may have access to it once its online.