Data Privacy Day: Selected Quotes and Insights from the Industry Leaders- The Conclusion

By Sudipto Ghosh Last updated Feb 3, 2020

Data Privacy Day: Selected Quotes and Insights from the Industry Leaders- The Conclusion

Dear readers, this is the concluding part of our Data Privacy Day coverage. We spoke to 50+ data privacy leaders, CEOs, CMOs, and research analysts to gather information about data privacy trends.

Our concluding chapter on Data Privacy Data includes insights from–

Adam Solomon, CMO of Lotame
Chris Babel, CEO, TrustArc
Todd Tran, Chief Strategy Officer lo for Teads
Vaibhav Arya, CEO of Media.net
Chris Mullaney, Data Protection Officer, UJET
Alex Igelsböck, CEO, Adverity
Kirit Basu, Head of Product Strategy, StreamSets
Anil D’Souza, Founder and CEO, Simpliance Technologies
Ian James, founder and CEO, Silverbullet

107 Countries With Privacy and Compliance Regulations and More in Tow

A new study announced on National Data Privacy Day, of 2,000 American consumers, found 82 percent think there should be a national privacy law to protect their personal data.

Adam Solomon, CMO of Lotame says,

“Millions of people are only now becoming more aware of how their personal information is being used, collected, and shared. Many businesses are scrambling to understand and address this impact and find lasting solutions. There are 107 countries with privacy and compliance regulations and more in tow. We can’t underestimate that this is hard work and many companies struggle to work through this and avoid negative impact.

Lotame believes healthy customer relationships are built on honoring our individual choices around consent and privacy. Lotame has taken a leadership role in GDPR and CCPA preparation, and we’ve made privacy a core value in addition to identifying everywhere we can incorporate privacy options and consent in our product roadmap.

In other words, doing the right thing by consumers is just good business.”

Solutions Are Still Ignoring the General Sentiment

Todd Tran, Chief Strategy Officer for Teads comments,

“Most solutions to tackle the decline of cookies focus on either maximizing what cookies remain or trying to get around cookies with an alternative ID solution. The problem here is that these solutions are still ignoring the general sentiment that consumers don’t want to be tracked and the law will continue to eliminate these solutions. The better approach is to focus on alternative targeting solutions that focus on context. Contextual targeting, if done with smart machine learning can be just as effective if not more than audience targeting solutions.”

Google and the Cookie-based Economy

Vaibhav Arya, CEO of Media.net says,

“Google’s decision to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years will make the web more private and secure, helping consumers to have private lives online just as they have offline. The move will force the industry to come up with new targeting that delivers marketer goals, but don’t rely on the cookie, keeping user data private. While we believe that contextual advertising is one of the best solutions to this challenge, we are excited to see the additional innovations that the industry will come up within the future.”

Privacy Is a Data-Use Issue, Not a “Check-The-Box” Compliance Issue

TrustArc’s CEO Chris Babel says,

“To best deal with the growing number of existing and impending regulations, companies must create processes that ingrain compliance into everyday operations. The best way for corporate leaders to do this is to realize privacy is a data-use issue, not a “check-the-box” compliance issue. Only when companies adopt a responsible data management approach vs. fulfilling regulatory requirements as they arise can they appropriately protect people and their data.”

Transparency Around PII and Data Collection

Chris Mullaney, Data Protection Officer, UJET says,

“In today’s business and consumer landscape, the protection of consumer data and PII is more important than ever. It is critical that businesses be open and transparent with consumers regarding the PII they are collecting, where it is being stored, how it is being used, and their ability to access their data should they request it. This transparency needs to be across all endpoints and stages of the customer journey.

This level of transparency and honesty around consumer data and PII will go a long way in building and strengthening a trustworthy relationship between consumer and company.”

Pseudonymization or Anonymization of Data

Alex Igelsböck, CEO, Adverity says,

“For years, data has become increasingly fragmented and siloed and this creates immense challenges for brands when it comes to protecting privacy. Fortunately, businesses are starting to understand the benefits of consolidating that data – not only to improve access to insights but to better protect the data they hold. But even with a platform that consolidates data, we would always recommend a couple of golden rules to ensure privacy is paramount. This includes using anonymized data, keeping data subjects informed of how you use data and how it is collected, the ability to opt-out and having a complete roadmap of all the third-party tools your brand uses and ensuring they have a robust privacy policy in place. For example, the Adverity platform offers various data protection features such as access restrictions, usage logs, the configuration of data retention schedules and the pseudonymization or anonymization of data.

Ultimately as an industry, we all owe a duty of care to ensure privacy is protected and there really is no excuse not to.”

Increased pressure on DataOps to Provide Constant Vigilance and Protection

Kirit Basu, Head of Product Strategy, StreamSets says

“In recent years, privacy has become a critical consideration driving architectural decisions. As the nature of data and regulatory pressures make the security and privacy of data more complex, enterprises must evolve from securing data at rest to adopting a posture of continuous governance where all data is protected no matter whether it’s at rest or in motion. As data evolves and regulatory pressure increases, staff such as Data Stewards and Data Protection Officers (DPO) need to be able to oversee a continually changing data security landscape. The new practice of DataOps provides for just such a framework of constant vigilance and protection.

Continuous governance is a core concept of DataOps and is about defining a security policy and automatically enforcing it whenever data flows through the enterprise. A DataOps-driven culture gives roles such as the DPO the ability to specify security policy and expect underlying systems to automatically enforce the detection and protection of data.”

Where Does ‘The Great Hack’ Takes You

Ian James, Founder and CEO, Silverbullet, comments,

“With data misuse hitting the national headlines regularly, consumers are now acutely aware of just how valuable their data is. They have woken up to the fact it’s being used on an industrial scale.

What started with the Cambridge Analytica scandal has snowballed through GDPR, high profile breaches and documentaries like ‘The Great Hack.’ Today, you’d be hard-pushed to find a consumer that didn’t have some awareness of their data and opinion on how it should be used.

It’s vital that marketers continue to respond to this.

Almost two years on from GDPR and months after the ICO released a clear warning to businesses operating in the AdTech space, there should be established skills in-house to manage data compliantly and tap into all of its potentials. Especially as we enter 2020, where there will be more regulations implemented and a crackdown on third-party cookies.”

Keep the Door Ajar to Let in AI-as-a-Service in 2020

Anil D’Souza, Founder and CEO, Simpliance Technologies says,

Artificial intelligence (AI) in GRC is the need of the hour. As companies expand their digital footprints, cybersecurity vulnerabilities increase due to A huge amount of data being produced. Surely, the demand for intelligent use of accumulated risk data will only increase. GRC solutions that incorporate AI and its application machine learning (ML), will play a major role. The key players in GRC industry shall offer AI-as-a-Service (AlaaS), particularly to industries where data is too valuable.

The other two important components in data privacy-centric development- Big Data and RPA.

Why Big Data? Big data can be extensively used in fraudulent activities and money laundering management. Also, it significantly reduces the cost of risk management, with automation and lower risk of failure.

Why RPA?

Because Robotic process automation (RPA) can be an important tool to build more robust and effective compliance programs. It will support continuous control monitoring as well as full sample-auditing, making it easier to detect anomalies. All these advancements will enable GRC functions to deliver greater value, and act as true strategic advisors to the business.

(To share your insights on data, marketing technologies and RPA in martech, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com)