The value of data privacy: Why protecting your customers’ PII matters

Why is data privacy important? Data protection laws are in place for a reason. Aside from the legal aspect, you also have a moral obligation to your consumers to safeguard the information they entrusted you with. Learn the fundamentals of data privacy, why it matters, and best practices for securing personally identifiable information (PII).

Why data privacy is important 

Data protection is a critical aspect of data-keeping and maintenance. Its relevance comes down to these all-important facets.

It protects customers’ personal information

Customers that create an account with your company input personal information. This includes:

• Credit card information
• Home address
• Date of birth
• Maiden name
• Phone number
• Email address

Some of these PIIs don’t seem that sensitive. After all, many people share these details on their social media channels. However, the information can be used for nefarious purposes, such as identity theft or taking out loans in your name. With B2B clients, digital security is even more important as your clients aren’t necessarily individuals but business entities. A breach of information jeopardizes the very companies you’re providing a service for.

It maintains security

Data privacy also matters for security reasons, especially at the B2B level. Apart from your customers, cyber threats also jeopardize the information security of your employees, supply chain partners, shareholders, subsidiaries, etc. 

It de-risks reputation management

If news of a data breach were to be made public, it can create a PR nightmare that’s extremely difficult to rebound from. Current clients may churn because you failed to protect their information.

In fact, 80% of consumers indicated they will defect from a company if their PII was leaked in a breach. Attracting new clients may also be more difficult, as the industries you cater to may deem doing business with you to be risky.

Four best practices for protecting data privacy

Cybercrime is ever-evolving, and you have to evolve with the landscape. Here are the latest best practices for safe data-keeping.

1. Adopt clear privacy policies

Your privacy policies should be accessible to clients, whether via website or email to subscribing members. It should outline the measures you take to ensure data security and data leak prevention. It should also include detailed information about what you will and won’t do with the data, such as:

• Never share customer information with third-party entities
• Never sell the information
• Only use the data for internal use

2. Collect only the data you need

According to a Forrester report, between 60% and 73% of company data goes unused. Stop collecting information that isn’t used for analytics. Unused data eats into storage space. The additional data also place your clients’ PII at greater risk should a breach occur.

3. Have a data governance strategy

Create an internal data governance policy. This will be the company’s official handbook with guidelines on storing, naming, and transferring data. This creates a uniform standard for handling information. This minimizes data from being misplaced, misfiled, incorrectly named, or handled by unauthorized staff.

4. Stay up to date with privacy laws

Stay up to date with privacy regulations as it pertains to your industry. More importantly, create data compliance and cybersecurity training for your employees. This ensures staff doesn’t inadvertently mishandle data in a way that places customer PII at risk. Also, outline the consequences for willfully mishandling data.

What are some of the challenges businesses face when protecting user privacy?

Preventing data breaches presents challenges that not even large-scale companies are immune to. Here are the common hurdles reported by small companies and fortune 500s alike. 

Fragmented data

Data is rarely ever located in a single database. Rather, it’s dispersed across varying mediums, including databases of third-party vendors. Internally, the data may be stored in the cloud, file shares, SharePoint sites, and even in the internal drive of company and personal devices. 

Data overload

Data can also be difficult to keep safe due to the sheer volume you’ve accumulated of customer profiles, transactions, purchase/browsing histories, etc. A single small to medium-sized business, in fact, has an average of 47.81 terabytes of both structured and unstructured data.

Information sharing

As mentioned, third-party partners may also have access to your data, including affiliates, subsidiary companies, and shareholders. Even if you take all the recommended precautions from the experts, are those third-party friends doing the same?

Keeping up with regulatory oversight

There’s no globally accepted data privacy regulation. Follow the online privacy laws of your country, state, or local jurisdictions. Most companies follow the blueprint outlined by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and/or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). With Lytics, utilize data repositories that keep personal information confidential and secure. We implement the latest anti-breach protocols, thereby staying faithful to GDPR and other internet privacy laws.