How can users encrypt a completed form?

Question

I'm creating a form into which users will enter personal information that should be protected in transit and in storage on my computer. I was thinking of telling the users to encrypt the completed form using a password that I supply. I would use the same password for a group of about 20 users. Is there a better way to protect the information? Can I include an "encrypt" button on the form that would increase the probability that the user would protect his/her data?

As far as I can tell, the user would have to attach the encrypted completed form to an email to send it back to me. I don't believe that the forms submission wizzard works with web-based email such as gmail. Is that correct?

The users will be sending receipts that may contain personal information. I was thinking of telling the users to scan the receipts into PDFs, to then encrypt these PDFs using the same password as they used to encrypt the form, and to attach the encrypted receipts to the email along with the encrypted forms. Is there anything wrong with this procedure? Is there a better way?

try67 · Answer

If you consider email safe enough then you can have them email it to you, but unless they have Acrobat they can't encrypt the file, and anyway that's not really a safe solution as it can be easily overcome.

A much more safe approach is to submit the form, either as a whole or just the data, to a (secure) web-server instead of using email.

That will require installing a script on the server (for example, in PHP or ASP) that will receive the data and then process it further.

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