Data Privacy Day: Empowering Individuals and Businesses to Respect Privacy, Safeguard Data and Enable Trust

Today is Data Privacy Day. One of our largest practice areas is cybersecurity and we spend our days helping those clients raise awareness about data privacy. And these concerns will only continue to grow. Today, the compound annual growth rate of data (11%) is far exceeding the rate of our population’s growth. As the population continues to grow at a rate of 1.05% per year, data grows at a rate faster than ever before. In fact, by 2027, data is expected to more than double its size reaching a net worth of over $103 billion. And with that comes cyberattacks increasing in prevalence and sophistication, and social media privacy scandals, as we saw with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

On Data Privacy Day, an international awareness day aimed to “inspire dialogue and empower individuals and companies to take action,” we thought we’d begin with resources on how to keep your data safe. How to Stay Safe Online is a resource from the National Cyber Security Alliance. Our clients at Okta also published a blog post today with five tips on how to help keep your private data private, which includes using messaging tools that support end-to-end encryption, optimizing privacy settings for IoT devices, and being careful about Bluetooth settings. Read more to mine through the confusion here. 

When we talked to Dark Reading senior editor, Sarah Peters, she shared some security tips, along with other security journalists, including Scott Matteson at TechRepublic, Shannon Vavra at Axios, and Kelly Jackson Higgins and Curtis Franklin at Dark Reading. She said, “I’m the resident privacy rights nut, so I generally say ‘everyone and everything is on a need-to-know basis, and nobody needs my 24/7 location data.’ In other words, I’m not going to let any and every app use my location, send me push notifications, access my photos, access my microphone, operate in the background, make changes, etc..”

Right now, the RSA Conference is right around the corner (Feb. 24-Feb. 28) and we expect data privacy to take center stage as a dominant topic of discussion as we have seen in past years. In 2018, RSA Security President, Rohit Ghai discussed government actions and policies in his keynote as well as how to take a business-driven security approach to managing digital risk. Rohit said, “By prioritizing incidents based on business context and focusing on the crown jewels of an organization—the most critical people, systems, processes, and organizations get a recipe for cyber-joy.”

To learn more about InkHouse’s security practice or meet with us at RSAC, contact us at workwithus@inkhouse.com.