Sensitive information can be sent to unauthorised recipients.

Such sensitive information can inadvertently fall into the hands of unauthorised users if employees are not sufficiently made aware of this danger and trained accordingly. For example, storage media can be passed on that contain residual information such as insufficiently deleted legacy data. Other residual information includes undeleted internal comments that may be inadvertently transmitted to an external recipient in an electronic document (e.g. as an e-mail attachment). In other cases, confidential documents can be accidentally sent to the wrong recipient because there are no clear guidelines for handling them.