Data privacy centers on the right to protect personal information online. Every time you stream a video, read a website or use an app, you create thousands to millions of data points about yourself. These data points are valuable to businesses and organizations that can use them to market products, recommend services, prescribe medical treatments or assess creditworthiness.
However, your data can be vulnerable to hacking and other risks, and you may lose control over how it is used if you don’t understand what information is being collected and by whom. In addition, your personal information is often shared by default when you interact with websites and apps that track your behavior to deliver targeted ads or personalized content.
Fortunately, there are ways to protect your data privacy. Companies can support data privacy by designing privacy concerns into their processes and products, obtaining explicit consent from users before processing their personal information and regularly updating their policies and procedures to reflect regulatory changes. They can also implement best practices such as maintaining centralized repositories where data is cataloged based on its type, level of sensitivity and compliance requirements to make it easier to discover and manage data.
In the United States, state lawmakers are pushing for privacy laws to fill gaps in federal legislation and address consumer concerns. Increasingly, they are setting privacy standards that are more stringent than those of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As such, it is critical to understand what information your organization has, where it lives and how it is being used, including by third parties.