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11/5/2018 Who Truly Owns That Data? | Transforming Data with Intelligence
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Who Truly Owns That Data?The ever-changing data privacy landscape in the United States iskeeping enterprises worried. Is data privacy actually achievable?
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11/5/2018 Who Truly Owns That Data? | Transforming Data with Intelligence
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For Further Reading:
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By James E. PowellNovember 5, 2018
As analytics and information technologies continue to evolve,individuals have lost control of the data they create in theirpersonal and work lives. Despite the emergence of new privacylaws, Kon Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies, a specialist leader ininformation governance for large enterprises, is starting toquestion who is truly on the hook to protect the privacy ofindividuals.
Following the EU'sGeneral DataProtection Regulation(GDPR), statesincluding Californiaand Colorado arepassing legislation tohelp protect citizens'data, begging thequestion: is thissomething that shouldfall to federal, state, orprivate organizations? Upside recently sat down with Leong todiscuss the role of technology within privacy and who isresponsible for implementing privacy measures.
Upside: How would you describe the current data privacylandscape in the U.S.?
Kon Leong: This is a complex question, but in short, the U.S. islightyears behind the EU with regards to privacy. The U.S. hasn'tlived through oppressive regimes in the way that Europe has, sowe carry a sense of naivety about privacy that Europe has longlost.
We create an unimaginable amount of data in both our personaland work lives, and the insight that can gleaned from it is onlygrowing. We're reaching somewhat of a breaking point thatrequires resolution before we proceed further. Technology will
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not wait for us to make up our minds about how we governprivacy.
In the U.S., who should be responsible for creating data privacyregulations?
Following the EU's comprehensive GDPR, certain states havefollowed suit with privacy regulations of their own. There are twoinitial issues I see. First, whether these regulations will becomeadequately enforced countrywide is yet to be seen. Second, we'recreating a checkerboard of various regulations with uniquerequirements that make them very dif�cult to implement.
For example, a national organization will have to take enormousdata sets and apply several sets of policies based on anindividual's residence. This is a highly involved process when youlook at the various data repositories large organizations handle.There is particular dif�culty on the unstructured side (datacreated by humans for humans, such as emails and documents).
Ultimately, there will have to be a federal privacy regulation toensure consistency. I will add, however, there will still need to bestate involvement because I wouldn't advise trusting a singlepower to regulate privacy.
Even with a single U.S. regulation, international enterprises willstill have to balance various regulations around the globe,requiring highly sophisticated data management capabilities at alevel that few companies have. Therefore, consistency andstandardization are advisable.
Is privacy actually achievable?
This depends on how you de�ne privacy. There are twoapproaches that enterprises can take: know nothing and knoweverything. The �rst entails leaving personal information aloneand hoping that no issues arise. In other words, "see no evil, hearno evil, speak no evil." Although this may not require any initialintrusion into personal information, it leads to complicationsbecause there's no way to ensure that personal data won't beaccessed by someone in the organization (for instance, foranalytics purposes), and if there's a breach, personal data can be
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left exposed.
The second approach -- to know everything -- involves intrusioninto documents at the content level, allowing appropriatepolicies and access privileges to be applied. This allows anorganization to remediate unnecessary data and ensure data isonly being used for the purpose it was created.
As strange as it �rst seems, without insight into all enterprisedata -- which might appear to be a breach of privacy to some -- itis very dif�cult to protect personal data. This logical progressionleads us to an unintuitive conclusion: privacy is about controland therefore requires intrusion.
How have new and advanced technologies affected U.S. dataprivacy?
The problem is twofold: analytics technologies have advanced byleaps and bounds over the past several years, and we've somehowforgotten to govern all the information. Organizations arecapable of knowing so much about you just by looking at youremail and the patterns your messages follow. Just on theenterprise side, for instance: who's likely to quit? This canpossibly be predicted before the individual even realizes ithimself.
There are amazing capabilities that are just now possible.However, we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop:information governance. To ensure privacy and reel in the uses ofanalytics, enterprises need an incredibly involved governancelayer. This requires synchronizing the various uses of data(analytics, recordkeeping, e-discovery, compliance, etc.) andmanaging the various data silos across the enterprise. Iforganizations are able to solve the governance piece, they willhave also solved privacy.
About the Author
James E. Powell is the editorial director of TDWI, includingresearch reports, the Business Intelligence Journal, and Upsidenewsletter. You can contact him via email here .
when it comes toanalytic and dataprograms. From head-scratchers aboutanalytics and datamanagement toorganizational issuesand culture, we aretalking about it allwith Q&A with JillDyche.
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