What Data Privacy Stands for in 2023

Marketing Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Platform and Data

January 30, 2023

For Data Privacy Day last year, we discussed best practices for executives and businesses to adopt to ensure they had a privacy-led approach to business success. We also did a survey on how data privacy and accuracy can impact business decisions. But in the short span of a year, the privacy landscape has changed significantly. The theme for this year could be summed up with one word – transparency.

Having a privacy-led approach is not a choice anymore as awareness of privacy concerns increases among consumers. Big stories in the media like the whopping fines Sephora and Amazon have had to pay due to data privacy violations have only increased scrutiny and conversations around privacy.

For businesses and executives, compliance with the ever-evolving privacy laws across different countries will not suffice. Your approach to privacy could also inform your customer’s opinions and trust in you. Cisco’s consumer privacy survey in 2022 revealed that 81% of respondents believed that the way a company treats their personal data is indicative of the way it views them as a customer. So customer trust, which is essential for business success could also depend on your approach to privacy.

Here are 5 trends around data privacy to be aware of for 2023:

Privacy Beyond Compliance: Being compliant with the various privacy laws is the least companies can do. What consumers demand today is transparency. Consumers want to know how their information is being used and be given the right to request for their data to be deleted. This ideally should be an easy thing to accomplish instead of redirecting your consumers to multiple form fills or a convoluted process to get their data removed from the database.

Compliance Must Be a Top Priority: Yes, we did mention that compliance is not enough, but the fact is that many companies are not meeting basic compliance requirements. Executives must make compliance their top priority and ensure that they meet the requirements of both old and newly added privacy laws across the world. And this ideally should be a proactive measure and not a reactionary activity with compliance achieved months after a law is passed.

Increase Privacy Spending: Ensuring privacy compliance and using the latest tools to safeguard your consumer’s data also requires companies to set aside a (generous) budget to tackle privacy concerns. Investing in privacy technology will help you gain consumer confidence and at the same time avoid fines due to increasingly common data leaks and breaches that even the largest companies in the world continue to face.

Secure Internal Data Handling: Companies must ensure that secure and fool-proof processes are set in place for internal data handling as well. In many cases, companies do not have stringent processes set in place within the company. Employees with access to sensitive data must be restricted and monitored to ensure leaks from within the system do not take place. This would also require investing in privacy tools that restrict access to sensitive data and ensure it is not downloaded and shared outside of the organization.

Partner with the Right Companies: When a data breach occurs, consumers do not differentiate between partners, vendors or clients. All are culpable and this means executives and companies must partner with responsible data partners. You need to be sure your data partnerships are truly safe. Most legal contracts and enforcement plans are reactionary and only put into action after a breach or leak has occurred. The resulting drop in consumer trust is a bigger loss than the potential fine you might face.

The stakes for protecting consumer privacy have never been higher. To make sure your company is responding appropriately, you need to both prioritize it with your own processes, and in how you select the vendors and partners you choose to work with.

As a company with global data on millions of consumers across the world, Azira has always taken stringent and proactive measures to ensure our partners’ and consumers’ data is protected. Interested to know more? Get a demo or check out our resources page.

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