Recapping the hot topics from Data Privacy Day 2019
National Data Privacy Day came around, bringing with it rising consumer awareness and a reminder that data privacy is now an instrumental component in shaping business operations and best practices. Though established back in 2007, Data Privacy Day has garnered a much bigger spotlight this year, as new legal regulations govern the privacy landscape.
On the annual holiday, LinkedIn hosted an event sponsored by the National Cyber Security Alliance, with privacy and security panelists from Verizon, Visa, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, & more. The event emphasized the importance of building a strong corporate culture where all levels of the organization share in the responsibility of aligning business interests to the evolving global privacy landscape. This stage provided further insight into how these organizations are actually implementing long-term privacy solutions to empower users and promote transparency into their data collection processes.
Privacy executives spoke on the privacy challenges their businesses are facing and remedies they are implementing as a result of government regulations. Below we share a recap of their major themes:
1. Privacy is a responsibility to share on all employee levels
“Data privacy is not just for the lawyers anymore… at LinkedIn we call it a Culture of Privacy. It’s really the responsibility of everybody at the company… It’s important for every employee to understand.” – Kalinda Raina, Head of Global Privacy @LinkedIn
2. What does privacy mean to your business and users?
“Start with the basics… define what privacy is… what do you think it means?… From your customer’s perspective and then from your business perspective.” Eva Velasquez, President and CEO @Identity Theft Resource Center
3. Prioritizing privacy from the top-down
“The starting place is the leadership at the very top of the company… a key driver if you need to drive a privacy aware, privacy by design culture… We have a regular meeting with the CEO …to report where we are going, how on track we are, what additional resources we need…. And that permeates through the organization” – Brendon Lynch, Chief Privacy Officer @Microsoft Corporation
4. Encourage and involve your employees
“Engage in a literacy program… around the ideas of data security and privacy. Allowing people to engage in a conversation around how perspectives are changing… incent them to ask questions upfront… We can start from the top-down but also meet from the bottom-up too.” – Kimberly Nevala, Strategic Advisor @SAS
5. Measuring privacy
“Establish your listening systems… tap into your support department and tap into social media, what are your customers saying. Use as many signals as you can… understand sentiment and … use that to drive change.” – Brendon Lynch, Chief Privacy Officer @Microsoft Corporation
As National Data Privacy Day sparked consumer awareness of privacy practices, businesses have responded by investing in privacy. In the event discussed, leading experts reminded us of the amount of data businesses are responsible for and made suggestions for best practices and future trends.
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