Transparency now!
The EU’s general data protection regulation is “principles based” with rather broad guidelines which are open to both interpretation and misinterpretation. Yet, beyond question is that the legislation contains very specific rights granted to EU citizens which are fundamental to individuals’ privacy: and ensuring those rights are recognised and scrupulously adhered to is key to compliance.
The right to access gives me as an EU resident the right to call up my telecom operator and say, “I want to see all of the personal data you have on me”. The right to erasure, also called the right to be forgotten, allows me to call up the company and say, “I want you to delete all the personal data you have on me.” (Mind you, to exercise this right, you’d have to qualify it by also saying that you no longer wish to have the service provided.) With the right to portability, I can ask for my data to be transferred from one service provider to another. Finally,the right to not be processed in a fully automated fashion means that I can demand that I don’t want to have decisions made about me based on an algorithm or based on analytics — I want a real person behind them.
These rights are at the core of the GDPR. As companies work through their compliance strategies, being able to ensure that they are in a position to be able to respond to these legitimate requests which usually within 30 days is really important. No matter how many seminars a DPO attends or how much money is poured into expensive consulting hours, there is no better way to avoid the consequences of not meeting the legal requirements than adopting a policy to enable transparency and give customers control over what is done with the information held about them.
This is why Microsoft and Apple have invested in privacy dashboards which go beyond a display of their privacy policies and act as a tool to manage preferences, facilitate communication as well as provide consent to data sharing. This is because a tool is the best way to shape behavior and ensure consistent, structured and timely responses.
According to Marie Wallace, Data Humanist, “In the same way consumers have decided that it’s socially unacceptable to buy from companies that pollute the environment, we could choose, as individuals and society, if we really want to engage with organizations that are not open and transparent about how they are collecting, analyzing and using information about us.”
When you demonstrate respect, you build trust. Providing customers with functionality to manage their private information and being transparent about data processing practices is a way of saying ”we value you, we value your data”.
