Daniel Barber, CEO at DataGrail chats about changing data privacy norms and how privacy should be at the core of building customer journeys:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Daniel – tell us about yourself and more about your role at DataGrail and how you got to being here..we’d love to hear about the DataGrail story…

Hello and thank you for having me…I spent much of my career working with data products and third-party apps, and grew increasingly disturbed by the extreme amounts of personal information collected and used by the brands that were trusted to keep it safe.

Believing that privacy is a human right, we founded DataGrail in response. In the five years since we began, DataGrail has become a leading data privacy platform, helping many of the world’s largest companies (like Salesforce, Okta, Overstock, RH, Dexcom), effectively manage their privacy programs to build greater trust and transparency while reducing business risk.  DataGrail is also home to one of the most active data privacy communities online, where people can come together to share best practices.

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How has DataGrail evolved over the years, what are some of the key near-future features the team hopes to add to the platform?

We founded DataGrail to protect privacy and we still do that extremely well by automating a person’s opt-out personal preferences, or orchestrating CCPA & GDPR data subject requests. We continue to improve those parts of our products and are evolving the platform to help companies identify privacy risk – a proxy for overall business risk.

With the DataGrail Privacy Dashboard, users will have instant visibility into both the current and historic health and impact of a company’s privacy program and provides actionable recommendations. The dashboard goes beyond simple tracking and reporting to help security, legal and marketing leaders truly understand and effectively communicate the privacy risk of their company.

Take us through the evolution of customer data and privacy norms and how you feel newer standards and policies will redefine how businesses handle this in the future?

We live in a time when consumers increasingly have come to the view, like I did, that privacy is a human right, and new regional and global privacy legislation are constantly being introduced to protect that right. Businesses must react and appropriately secure and manage personal data across all their systems and applications.

However, companies struggle to understand the impact of privacy risk as a leading indicator of overall business risk.

Currently, there is no standard way to monitor privacy risk at an organization, nor are there intelligent workflows that guide teams through filling out risk assessments (DPIAs or PIAs). The language used in the GDPR and CCPA is not precise and often left to interpretation, making it a challenging and time-consuming process for privacy managers. DataGrail removes the complications to move companies toward privacy best practices.

By delivering actionable insights aimed at protecting consumers and internal resources, DataGrail’s new Privacy Dashboard sets the standard for effectively identifying risk, and gives businesses an unprecedented look at program health.

What are some of the core policies and practices that business leaders need to implement across the board to drive better privacy norms?

To do business today, companies know they should build a privacy practice that covers regulatory requirements, identifies risks and build’s customer trust. But knowing where to start can be hard.

First and foremost, privacy is a business problem. It’s an evolving space that is highly fragmented and it means different things to different people. It requires everyone in the company to understand the implications of privacy, regardless of who “owns” privacy.  Strong communication across security, legal, marketing and privacy is vital.

The first step to building a privacy program is understanding and getting control of your data. Once you know where your data is, you can build privacy fulfillment and operations on top.  Find a partner that can integrate with SaaS apps & internal systems, and find unknown SaaS apps containing personal data. Once you’ve done that you can automate elements of your data privacy program, like consent, do-not-share opt-outs and data subject requests. Lastly, we recommend finding a community or a partner who will offer ongoing support as you build and scale your privacy program.  Privacy is constantly changing, so you need a partner with you to help you grow.

Take us through some of the biggest faux pas leading brands have been making in this regard and what marketers / business leaders can learn from it?

Many companies sought to comply with the GDPR or the CPRA, and while that puts them on the right track for future regulations, it doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be compliant, nor does it mean that they fully eliminated risk.

Companies should take a risk-based approach to managing privacy, and do what they can to be transparent with customers to ultimately build trust.

Five things you’d tell anyone in martech or B2B tech to do to ensure they prevent data leaks or compromises of any kind?

The most important thing is to know what systems you have that contain personal data. At DataGrail, we’ve seen customers come to us—assuming they had a handle on all the third-party SaaS apps they had—but once we conducted a data mapping exercise, we would find 50% more third-party apps!  Do your best to build a comprehensive blueprint of the applications in your company, and from there you can automate privacy and eliminate risk.

On top of this is more of a cultural imperative. Always keep the needs of the end user top of mind. What is in their best interest when you’re designing software? How could retaining certain data points impact them in the event of an attack or data leak? If more people would consider the needs of the end user, and think of privacy implications from their point of view, privacy and data management practices would change for the better, leaving them far less vulnerable.

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