Data privacy centers on protecting personal information online, ensuring that digitally stored data is only used for the intended purpose. It also involves ensuring that your company’s policies and practices align with user expectations and regulatory standards.
From names and email addresses to medical records and browsing habits, data is created every time someone uses a product or service. While that data has incredible value for businesses, it can also pose significant risks to people’s privacy. That’s why a strong data protection strategy is critical to keeping your customers’ trust, even in the face of growing security threats.
The term “personal data” refers to any information that can be used to identify an individual, either directly or indirectly. That includes everything from names and email addresses to location information, biometric data, religious beliefs, political opinions, web cookies and more. Even pseudonymous information can fall into this category if it is easy to ID a person from the data.
When it comes to data privacy, the key concepts are lawfulness, fairness and transparency – meaning that your organization should be clearly communicating with users about how their personal information will be used. Data minimization is another important concept – it means that you only collect the data necessary to accomplish your purposes. Finally, authorization and authentication are critical, ensuring that only those authorized to access data can do so. This is usually accomplished through multi-factor authentication, which requires a user to provide something they know (e.g. a password), something they have (e.g. a mobile device) or something they are (e.g. a fingerprint).