This Data Privacy Day is different. Below, three experts offer insights and advice into some of the major business concerns with privacy and technology as AI transforms the way organisations manage data to create value for society.
These points cover how we must safeguard our personal information to prove our identity, both with and against AI as it’s used by good and bad actors. Organisations must create the right foundations for safe data privacy and business success with resilient architecture. Customer privacy is particularly key in sales and marketing, where AI can massively change how data is used to interact with customers.
Protecting the privacy of identity information used to be about physical checks like witnessing a signature live or requesting a professional to vouch for you in a transaction like a passport application. This is a pre-digital approach that can’t survive modern consumer expectations. Yet with digital solutions, like online banking and eSignatures, consumers have to trust their service providers will keep their data safe as well as make their tasks easier to manage.
This makes AI advances like the rise of GenAI deepfakes a real concern. Sophisticated, lifelike simulations can easily deceive and manipulate people, posing significant threats to trust, security, and authenticity across many areas. In the age of AI it’s vital that we preserve trust between one another.
That’s why international frameworks, bodies and regulations – such as eIDAS and the FIDO alliance – which establish common rules for an array of ‘trust services’ including electronic signatures, electronic seals, and time stamping, are becoming more important in the major parts of our lives. These solutions, including digital and identity wallets offer a huge ease of use – speeding payments, verification, and allowing users to re-apply their data with different agreements to save time.
Data Privacy Day is a moment to confirm that digital operations are resilient and all data – not just personal data – is protected.
Remember that privacy requires not just data protection – security – but a robust discipline for digital resilience. This ensures that you are collecting only data you need, that users and customers know the data collected and why, and you have processes to ensure the management, including deletion, of that data. This helps protect against data leaks regardless of where they come from – nation states, cybercriminals, well-intentioned insiders. Having digital resiliency means that you can understand, react to, and weather these challenges to business operations.
Digital protection and resilience are the result of robust security and privacy controls and is in maintaining customer trust. Trust is further enhanced by transparency: clearly identifying how data is collected, stored and used, including in the service of emerging technologies like GenAI.
The right digital operations platform empowers operational teams handling break-fix and maintenance, providing automation and recommendations for remediation, ensuring customer data is protected and available for excellent service at all times.
Most organisations can get a solid hold of customer privacy issues simply by using the right solutions for their business activity. For example, sales and marketing, the beating heart of a business, holds a lot of data and personally identifiable information on customers – all with consent. These teams rely on specialist CRM platforms to organise, track, and analyse their campaigns.
Emerging AI integrations and features are able to offer support should a sales pro make a mistake. The use of AI can be viewed as guardrails to prevent the accidental data leak or mis-sent email by providing contextual advice or taking automated steps to maintain the privacy protections promised to ones’ customers.
The best use of AI will be to monitor and support best practices in data privacy, protection, and use, joining up actions with policy and flagging if expected behaviours begin looking suspicious.
It’s crucial that organisations understand how their processes can safely evolve as technology offers more power for good, as well as greater threats from malicious parties. Cybercriminals are determined to exploit under-protected customer data and GenAI can give them more sophisticated tools for phishing and spoofing. Failing to safeguard privacy comes at a regulatory cost, too. Firms who suffer data breaches are likely to incur financial damages in the form of lost revenue, fines and long-term damage to their brand and reputation. All in all, AI promises to massively change the pace of activity in the world of privacy, this year.