If Customer Data is So Precious, Why Are There So Many Leaks?
Data insecurity popped up in the news again last week, and these frustrating stories highlight a sadly perennial pattern for companies relying heavily on technology to power their businesses. At the core of the problems is a failure to embed values and real, considered empathy into the team building the software, and the code that they are writing.
Bad Company Culture Enables Bad Data Decisions
The first type of problem concerns how the internal team treats customer records and information.
Lyft made the news with customer data leaking from employees using their “God-view,” which essentially means that certain employees at a company are enabled with full access to all data within the system. This is not nefarious, and almost every tech-driven company has a version of this view. It’s necessary for everything from replicating bugs to processing refunds, and may be referred to by teams across product, customer support, and marketing. What does vary from company to company is: which employees have access, what level of access they have, what that access is for, and how that access is monitored and enforced.
WHAT HAPPENED:
Our source says that the data insights tool logs all usage, so staffers were warned by their peers to be careful when…
