Protecting your consumer data is often thought of as the same as data privacy. However, there is a considerable difference between the two. In this post, you are going to learn about how to protect the data and privacy of your users.

Data Protection and Data Privacy

Data protection deals with providing policies and tools to restrict data access. The customers’ data privacy deals with who can access the secured data.

As a business, you must have a compliance protocol in place to cater to customers’ privacy requests and protect their personal and financial data. You can apply data privacy and protection to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI).

Both PII and PHI play a vital role in your company’s development, operations, and finances. Protection of data allows you to prevent potential data breaches and hacks. Most importantly, it protects your business from any damage to your reputation.

Why is Data Privacy Important?

Data privacy offers a guideline about how you should collect and handle data. However, you must handle your data based on priority and sensitivity. The PII and PHI data privacy includes the following:

•         Name
•         Date of Birth
•         Contact Information
•         Social Security Number
•         State ID Number
•         Medical Records
•         Financial Information and more.

In simple terms, data privacy is applicable to any sensitive customer information that your business processes or handles. Hence, ensuring the confidentiality of data will protect the information from any criminal attempts to steal the data for nefarious purposes.

7 Ways to Ensure Data Privacy in Your Company

If you are a company dealing with customers’ data, there are numerous data privacy protocols you can deploy. Let us explore how you can ensure data privacy for your customers.

1. Data Authentication

You can use data authentication to verify the credentials and identity of every user. This way, you will be able to grant and authorize access to each user according to their role.

2. Data Encryption

You must encrypt your data to keep it safe if it falls into the wrong hands. You can use various data encryption tools and software solutions in the market. Additionally, this will give you and your customers peace of mind.

3. Data Inventory

You can ensure your users’ privacy by understanding the type of data you have and how you handle it. moreover, when doing an inventory of your data, it is important for you to draft a policy that states the protocols for data collection and handling.

During this process, you must also determine how frequently you want the system to scan your data and how the data is classified upon location and identification. Therefore, your privacy policy must clearly state the protections you need to maintain certain data privacy levels.

This data privacy policy must also include detailed protocols for conducting an audit of your customers’ data protection tools and solutions. Additionally, you must check if the data protection methods are applied correctly.

4. Data Storage With Built-In Security

Using modern data storage equipment with a built-in data protection system would be best. Moreover, this will protect your customers’ data from any hacking attempt.

5. Firewalls

Protect your computer networks and IT infrastructure with robust firewalls. This will allow you to monitor, control and filter traffic on your network. Furthermore, you can use a firewall to implement user authorization for limited access or data transfer.

6. Honesty and Transparency with Users

You have to be open, honest, and transparent with your customers. Therefore, do not exaggerate your privacy protocols to satisfy the security concerns of your users. Consequently, if you are really concerned about user satisfaction, learning about their pain points and including their consent in the data privacy protocol design is the best way forward.

7. Minimizing Data Collection

In order to create an efficient data privacy solution, you must ensure that the system only collects necessary data. Therefore, the more data you collect, the greater your liability will be in case of a hack or cyberattack.

Therefore, you must avoid extensive data collection and prevent the hassle for your security team and data storage team. On a monetary side, minimal data collection protocol will also help you save data storage space and internet bandwidth.

You can achieve this goal using the “verify, not store” framework. Therefore, this system leverages third-party data for user verification and rectifies the need to transfer or store customers’ information on your system.

How Good is Your Data Privacy?

Regardless of the size and niche of your company, you need data privacy and protection to handle customers’ information. We at Kamsoft Technologies are the pioneers and most-trusted data privacy solution providers. Speak to one of our data security experts to discuss your needs today.

We will be able to develop a customized data privacy and protection solution for your company per your needs and budget.