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Privacy Regulations: Businesses Must Build Programmatic and Technological Solutions for Privacy
People’s lives are increasingly spent online, and the data generated from their online searches and electronic transactions are often concentrated in the storage repositories of big tech companies. But that data provides a huge commercial advantage for those companies which hold it which raises serious privacy concerns.
Global regulations are being adopted to protect personal data privacy. Gartner expects that the personal data of 75 percent of the world’s population will be in some way regulated by the end of 2024.
But these regulations are having a big impact on companies. Global Fortune 500 companies spent $7.8 billion in 2018 in order to prepare for compliance with the GDPR, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Hossein Rahnama and Alex “Sandy” Pentland, professors associated with the MIT Media lab, writing for Harvard Business Review, said that regulations are forcing companies to restructure their business practices related to collecting and handling data. The HBR report outlines a strategy for businesses to follow to comply with privacy regulations:
- Businesses must earn trust to encourage customers to provide consent for the use of their data. Key to being successful in gaining trust is being able to describe to customers how their data will be used and what benefits they will be able to derive by providing their consent.
- Businesses must stop gathering specific user-identifying information and instead focus on deriving overall statistics and anonymized data of users, something Rahnama calls ‘insight over identity’.
- Consumers will be in greater control and need only consent to the use of their data when they think that they can derive benefits that they find important.
A piece in Fortune Magazine concludes that “programmatic, technological solutions for privacy are possible if businesses build them, citizens demand them, and the government creates the framework for their necessity.”
