Another advantage is that it saves you money. While this amount of disk space can hardly be considered free at this point, many CDPs and other SaaS applications have billing models based on the amount of data (customer records) they hold. The company I helped saw significant reductions in CDP license costs after the cleanup.
- Develop and manage a consent framework for new data and anonymize it where possible.
Have more trust in the first-party data you collect. Inform customers when data is collected and for what purposes it will be used. Please let us know about this collection before collecting. For any new uses of your data, please request further consent or anonymize your data.
In the latter case, one such technique involves encryption of identifiers that allows different datasets to be linked for analysis, but still obfuscates the original data. Another technique is homomorphic encryption. In this technology, the data owner encrypts the dataset and sends it to the cloud (or another server) for processing. The server processes the data without decrypting it and sends the encrypted result back to the owner (the only party that can encrypt it). Decrypt the result.
- Drive partner accountability
Who do you share your data with? What do they do with it? Do they always use customer data in a way that aligns with their promises to you? Contracts within your partner ecosystem and agreements and hold partners accountable. “Having a mutually acceptable attitude towards privacy (and modern slavery, ethical sourcing, etc.) is a condition of doing business with us.
- Ensure a breach notification plan exists and is up to date
Have you ever run a boardroom wargame to simulate a data breach? Have you done it again in the past 12 months?
- Educate your team and support people who raise issues
“Jidoka” is a lean principle started by Toyota. An important principle of jidokai is that anyone can raise a problem and actually stop the production line. In many organizations I've worked for, shutting down all production would be career suicide, but at Toyota, the first step in the process is for managers to identify the employee who initiated the shutdown and say, One example is saying “Thank you.” This promotes a quality-first culture. Only by thanking and rewarding those who raise privacy concerns can we promote a privacy-first culture.