The 4 Traits of High-Growth, Privacy-Smart Organizations
Privacy is about more than mitigating risk. For forward-looking companies, it’s a strategic advantage.
After last week’s post on tools, this week our good friend JJ from Ketch is back discussing how improved privacy controls can help businesses accelerate growth while also creating a more human-centered web for users.
The Role of Data Privacy Has Changed
We are witnessing a turning point in how brands and advertisers are viewing privacy. For a long time, data privacy was a box to check to minimize liability before you got back to the ‘real work’ of building your company. Now, the game has changed, and more sophisticated companies are realizing that using customer data to fuel your business means being savvy about privacy and permissions.
This is significant for businesses and their customers. People end up with a human-centered internet where their preferences are respected. What we like to call Data Dignity. Businesses are starting to see that being responsible with data use helps them grow, and remain on the cutting edge. Organizations can’t be innovative with data unless they have good data hygiene, and a key part of getting your house in order is making sure you know what data you have, what it is permissioned for, and how you can use it to expand your business.
But what does a more human-centered web even look like? I have 4 traits in mind based on what is possible today and how it might benefit both people and business.
Trait #1 - Know Your Customer Preferences (and Apply Them)
Let’s start off easy, shall we? This is the foundational, bread and butter layer that every business should be able to easily check off their list. Of course, knowing your customers’ preferences is the easy part. Actually applying them is difficult.
Many companies know their customer preferences, especially for basics like whether or not the person has opted in or out of marketing services. However, the real question is whether those preferences actually shape your business practices or collect cobwebs in some long-forgotten database.
The value for customers is clear. You want a company to abide by what you ask them to do. What you don’t want is to find out that, say, you asked Amazon to delete your child’s voice data only to find out they were using it to train their algorithms months later.
The value here for companies is obvious as well. People trust companies that are accountable and do what they say. You cannot display any of the following traits without first knowing what your customers want. Do that, and you can then focus on ethically creating more value through the following.
Trait #2 - Know What Data you Have and How to Describe it
This is where things start to get tricky. Smaller organizations tend to have an easier time with this, but as companies scale, competing data silos and management policies muddy the water and make it hard to know whose data is where.
This trait also extends beyond your own internal systems and applies to your third-party apps as well. Consumers don’t care how well you organize your data in-house if you allow third parties to abuse their data in ways that violate their permissions.
For companies, this is where the value really starts to become obvious. Visibility and classification of data is the foundation to maximize its value. This is becoming more important everyday as companies are deploying AI. The companies whose data can be easily found and described will have a clear advantage because they know what data they can use to train AI models. Organized data is more than just good hygiene, it’s a strategic advantage in driving value from AI.
Trait #3 - Treat People as People
Here’s where things get a bit more advanced. People live their digital lives across countless devices, and a human-centered approach would take people’s preferences with them wherever they go. Cross-device and multi-channel, as they say.
Regulators are already starting to ask for this. In a recent enforcement action California’s Attorney General emphasized the need for consumers’ opt-out requests to be honored across their different devices when using streaming services.
Smart companies incorporate native identity infrastructure in their privacy and data stack. There are a couple of important value drivers for that. Firstly, you get to treat people as people. A privacy choice made on one device is honored across others. Or the choice your customer made on their phone, is honored across their smart TV and internet browsers.
Secondly, responsible identity infrastructure gives you the keys to enforce privacy instructions across your data ecosystem. For example, to enforce your customer’s privacy choice for data housed in a marketing system, you need to know the identity key used by that marketing system so they know who you’re talking about when you respect a privacy choice.
Trait #4 - Record Permissions and Tie Them to What You’re Doing with Data
Lastly, what ties this whole system together is pairing permissions and purposes (what you do with data) to your data wherever it lives so that your entire organization knows what data can be used for. The way we do this is by stamping data with your compliance and governance policies. Every piece of data remains connected to its purpose, regardless of its location.
Companies need to always understand the purpose of the data they have (why they collected it, and what it’s used for. E.g. advertising, or analytics). It’s especially important when you plan to use data for AI or for training AI models. Often, AI related use cases trigger what regulators call a “secondary purpose”, which means you may need separate and distinct permission from your customer, rather than a vague addition to your privacy policy that you might use data for AI.
Just this week, FTC Chair Lina Khan emphasized that her agency is working to actively enforce privacy laws for companies using AI, including cracking down on companies who think they can get away with “quietly and retroactively rewriting their terms of service” when they want to use customer data for AI models.
Tell us your thoughts! What other privacy traits help companies and their customers?
What We’re Reading On Ethical (and Non-Ethical) Tech This Week:
A.I. used to decipher ancient scrolls from 2,000 years ago (NBC News)
Elon Musk sues ChatGPT-maker OpenAI over Microsoft links (BBC)
FCC chairwoman asks that automakers be subject to a domestic abuse law (Axios)
Meta Wants Llama 3 to Handle Contentious Questions as google Grapples with Gemini Backlash (The Information)
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