5 Best Practices for Ensuring Data Privacy

2018 must surely be the year of privacy. In a recent poll, 63% of U.S. adults said they would NOT be willing to share personal data in exchange for ads to keep a service free. This outcome is likely due to recent raised public awareness of privacy and its impact on lives. Much of this is thanks to the high-profile of GDPR compliance and the recent Facebook debacle.

Privacy has become an issue for all, and the general public’s understanding of what privacy actually is has improved. Because if this, data privacy now touches both the enterprise and the individual.

But far from being a negative, attention to data privacy can have positive effects on a business. Being “privacy-respectful” is part of the exercise taken by a company to build relationships with customers. Time and again, data breaches result in not only lost information, but lost reputation and damages too. This can include share price drops — a typical example being the case of Equifax, which experienced a drop of 35% post-data breach.

Privacy, or specifically, the application of tenets of privacy to data, is often seen as a massive hurdle to cross for a company. How do you apply something that seems so amorphous? Well, privacy is part of a process, and that process can be achieved using some simple forethought and best practices.

5 Best Practices for Getting Privacy Right

If you have dealt with GDPR at all, you will have heard of the phrase “Privacy by design and default.” This encapsulates an ethos which encourages the baking-in of privacy across technology, systems, processes and people.

The result of the actions taken to implement this is a “culture of privacy.” Having a culture of privacy will instill in your employees and wider business associates an (Read more...)