Forecast: how will privacy develop in the coming years. Part 1.
It is always interesting to know what the future holds. Especially when it comes to important business decisions that can determine the fate of an entire company.
Privacy protection has come into our lives for good, and it would be short-sighted to turn a blind eye to it. An experienced business owner will always try to take all factors into account in order to build a successful strategy.
In today’s article, Mira Suleimenova, GDPR and Privacy Consultant, Founder of Privacy Issues Project shared her vision of what the industry will face in the next few years.
Firstly, many countries are starting to pass legislation to protect privacy. The US has state-level laws, federal laws, and California is already passing its second piece of legislation.
This year, China is going to pass a stricter data protection law. According to it, all data that companies collect about their citizens must only be stored in China.
All of this is important not only at the individual country level, but also at the global level. If you look at the privacy protection map right now, it is very fragmented. There are regions where there is no regulation at all, and there are territories where the laws are very strict.
This creates a challenge for start-ups and services that want to operate internationally. They have to enforce all the different laws and regulations, which creates risks for the project and is a cause for worry.
And that leads us to the second trend. Companies, and especially startups, will create more workplaces for in-house privacy specialists.
I can see that even small startups are concerned about making things right and increasing their value in the market. So they need someone who can monitor trends, implement all current changes and periodically review all internal processes related to data collection and processing.
Moreover, I observe that this affects not only European startups. Many projects which are being set up in the CIS countries are already thinking globally too, and keeping an eye on all trends. Whereas many used to have the mindset “it won’t affect us”, now only a few think like that.
Investors give money to those startups which want to grow beyond the borders of their own country and enter international markets. Therefore, those who want funding never ignore what is happening in other markets and what legislation is in place there.
The third is that the pandemic has forced companies to think about how to protect the privacy not only of their consumers but also of their employees. Many people now work from home. It’s our personal space, our family, children, personal belongings are nearby, we access the internet from home wi-fi.
But so far there are very few smart tools for secure remote work. Therefore I think that such products will appear more and more, and the demand for them will increase.
Employers, particularly European employers, will look for remote work tools that offer the highest data protection for their employees.
Thus, tools from American developers are likely to become less popular. After all, under the American Cloud Provider Act, all data that US providers store in their clouds can be handed over to the US government. Although changes have started gradually there as well, and the government will try to make life easier for its vendors.
