Your Business and Privacy by Design

With the world and technology changing fast, at the turn of the millennium, cybercrime and hacking have been rising. Developed countries are seeing growing numbers; in the digitization of their businesses. This growing digital migration increases cybercrime cases. A Gizmodo article highlights disasters of data breaching in 2017, showing the extent of cybercrime that year.

According to the report, there was a leakage of information of every US voter. Additionally, social security numbers of over 100 million citizens disappeared to theft, and financial data of small retail businesses were left exposed. Equifax topped the list of the report, with over 140 million consumers vulnerable to identity theft.

Securities and Exchange commissions and Deloitte were listed to have suffered breaching. 

A study from Javelin Strategy & Research concluded; over 15.4 million Americans lost 16 billion Dollars. An increase, compared to the previous year. Moreover, the problem your business faces are its consumers, and not just cybercriminals. 81% of hacking-related breaching, according to Verizon Data Breach Investigations and Report, was due to weak or stolen passwords. 43% of bursts involved spoofing, which led to the stealing of passwords.

Moreover, information technology administrators fail at maintaining their best practices, adding more human factors as causes for breaching. The solution, however, is to change the behaviors of people. You will achieve this; by embedding privacy in the policies of your organizations.

Privacy by Design, a frontrunner in solving breaches, is a classic application design and development strategy. Discussions are ongoing on how it will be a fundamental strategy for organizations to deal with these problems.

Privacy By Design

When Privacy by Design begun, its goal was for you to develop best practices as a developer; incorporating privacy into your products. Even if privacy was not your highest priority, reengineering privacy into a product was expensive after failure. Therefore, developers had to provide security for your employee or customer data.

Fast forward to the present, the number one priority for your business is privacy. With more business and consumers going digital, data is increasing significantly. This increase creates more opportunities for attacks from hackers. The new regulations placed require a strong foundation of privacy in their products. 

The number of attack options related to breaching privacy is expanding, and this leaves your business vulnerable. These options include; the internet of things, over a collection of data by governments, and allowing scanner apps to keep the data they scan. Furthermore, new technologies are evolving and becoming complex. This evolution also creates significant legal responsibilities; who is at fault in the case of an accident involving a self-driving car or data collected by a medical device implant or a fitness tracker.

Privacy by Design’s seven principles helps you protect your company’s and customer data.

Where to Apply The Seven Principles

When conducting business, ensure there is absolute integrity in handling your information. Have a single source of your business and customer data. This source will prevent multiple copies and inconsistency in the information you have stored. 

Cross-examine the life cycle of every source of data; collected and deleted. Moreover, identify and stop any potential risks that your organization may face in the future. 

Ensure you monitor all incoming data and have unified governance of the system. Monitoring clarifies data henceforth, governing policies applied.

Effectively, balance strategic objectives with privacy goals when marketing your business brand. Four your website ensure users, social media data collection, and customer privacy is default. 

Ensure your employees’ life cycles value privacy. Training, better policies, and good support from human resources, result in your employees applying privacy in their work.

Oversee that your financial data is safe from cyber-attacks and hacking. Equip your employees with more knowledge about risks related to financial services. Exposure to the risks enables your employees to overcome challenges. 

For your business to grow and have a constant supply of goods and services, you have to share data with your supplier. Your partners should therefore take privacy seriously as you do.

Assess your legal partner’s privacy policies. Additionally, perfect a defensible disposable program to erase data without any business or legal value. Thus you reduce the risks by providing less information about your business and customers.

Evaluate privacy policies of retailers and vendors, especially those who provide cloud services. This assessment will inform you on whether their privacy approach is similar to yours.

Steps to Undertake

Have vast knowledge of the obstacles that face your business and customers regarding the privacy of their data. Achieve this by gaining more information on; Privacy by Design and related topics. Educate your employees and customers about security, even though the stakes are getting higher. 

Use the Privacy by Design approach in your business even as the risks increase, and prevent them.