Data Privacy | Internet Business & Consumer Law

Data privacy of consumers has become a prevailing concern for many businesses and services related entities causing them to seek a balance for data privacy protection. As data accumulates with every activity in the digital world, retaining that information securely is a critical responsibility. Data privacy is critical with the process of sharing information for marketing purposes complicates things a whole lot more than how things use to be before the digital era. There is a clash so-to-to-speak between data privacy and the burgeoning data economy. Many third-party marketing services rely on customer information to run service quality surveys. There are too many occurrences of loose transfers of consumer data between entities.

From a consumer perspective, appears to have been ignored as a result of the cycle of benefit and compromises, along with the cyber vulnerabilities, and with all the active forces involved in the data economy ecosystem. Data culling and gathering is needed for consumer profiling, which raises another spectrum of issues. Industries have organized to propose notions of self-regulation to forestall heavy handed regulation of data. It has also been a way to fill the void of slow government efforts and the inability to keep abreast of innovation. The industry entities across the economy have emphasized their privacy policies and instituted forms of common practices deemed as measures addressing the need to enhance privacy and the management of data collected.

Data privacy concerns has driven some organizations to voluntarily presume to be bound by policies to be on the safe side. Inherent in most privacy policies is the initiative to allow consumers to have some semblance of control and discretion over their data. Offering the option of “do not track” approach by government and many entities, is one such measure sought to allow consumers to exercise discretion over personal information.

The self-claimed internal privacy policy is commonly deemed sacrosanct by entities. Another self-claimed measure is to give consumers discretion over their “PII” (personal identifiable information). Industries, in the spirit of self-regulation, have responded to the concerns by proposing opt-out vehicles where the selection is taken to limited ads, control how browser retains Internet usage and the cookies sites execute, and to control location-based-services.

In practice, industries may positively contribute through their self-regulation initiatives as they may be best suited to respond to the intrusive innovations that compromise data and best suited to develop measures to allow for more consumer control over their data. The idea of self-regulation and not government-imposed mandates addresses the balance and provides a way so that advertising revenue is not impinged. Entities will growingly be relying on the other to enhance data privacy protection.

As the cloud process continues to be so prominent with remote access centers driving data storage and data processing of consumer private information, there needs to be greater attention to ensure that the cloud does not get too cloudy with consumer data privacy breached and unethical data sharing. Unfortunately, as privacy concerns clash with the need for data and the utility of data in the economy, the balance will most probable be drawn with litigation driving the issues home and create a reasonable balance between the two for the data privacy protection.