Information has always been key to the world’s development. Humanity has always learned from occurrences and made evidence-based decisions. In our digital world, the majority of information in digital form is termed data. Data is being used to make all business decisions, improvements, analytics, forecasting, and for a multitude of other world-building purposes. There are around 4.95 billion active internet users. The world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
Data is the core to Digital Transformations
Modern businesses are heavily tech-driven and traditional businesses are undergoing digital transformation. Digital transformations are the key to business evolution in the current economy and data is the core to digital transformations. A very important part of this data is personal and sensitive data belonging to individuals.
Information related to identity, location, communication, behavior, finances, qualification, transactions, IP address, cookie, and device information, associated directly or indirectly with an individual and making them identifiable is personal data.
Sensitive data is a set of special categories that makes an individual more vulnerable if not handled properly. These special categories are ethnic or racial origin, political opinions, cultural or social identity, philosophical or religious beliefs, trade union memberships, and genetic and biometric data.
Personal/ sensitive data is collected from end users, customers, third-party vendors, employees, business partners, and other stakeholders. Any mishandling, misuse or exploitation, whether intentional or not can impact them financially, socially, and psychologically. Individuals may face humiliation, discrimination, identity theft, and loss of control over their personal data.
Get Granular with Data Privacy
A large number of countries across have recognized this as a potential area to be regularized, hence governments and authorities have either introduced a data privacy regulation or have planned to introduce the regulation in the near future. Regulators have provided mandates and guidelines around data collection, processing, storage, transfer, and retention of personal or sensitive data. Organizations under scope must adhere to the applicable regulations. Non or partial compliance with privacy regulations might lead to penalties imposed by regulatory authorities. These penalties can be quite hefty and may even go up to 4% of the global revenue of these organizations. The adverse impact of not handling personal data appropriately is likely to cause both financial and reputational damage. Customers’ trust in sharing data with the organizations will diminish, which eventually will diminish their credibility.
Adhering to privacy best practices and being regulatory compliant is one of the most important factors in enhancing organizational trust factor. Organizations will need to get granular about regulatory compliance and particularly about industry best practices. This will allow customer trust to build and has the potential to impact business’ financial performance.
Organizations will focus on a numbers of key areas to get privacy compliant with their relevant regulations.
- Privacy Drivers identification
- Creating a vision and structuring the privacy team
- Privacy framework development and implementation
- Privacy risk identifications and remediations strategy
- Privacy operational life cycle establishment
Having served three global clients across 50+ countries, MINDSPRINT has the expertise and experience to help organizations establish privacy compliance strategies and achieve privacy compliance.
Our privacy services include:
Vidhan Rai is the risk and compliance manager at MINDSPRINT. You can always count on him for guidance with the best Data Privacy & Governance solutions, streamlining business processes, and establishing a robust Data Privacy Operations mechanism.
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