Minimizing Data Volume Can Reduce Risks and Costs Privacy Experts Say
Minimizing the amount of data collected and stored can diminish the risk of data breach litigation and reduce storage costs, a panel of privacy experts said during an IAPP webinar Wednesday.
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“The more data you have, the more cost that is associated" with related processes surrounding it, said Victor Adu-Gyamfi, corporate investigations team lead at Progressive Insurance. For example, “if your matter is settled, and you don't purge that data, it stays there, waiting ... to be hit” in a breach, he said
Companies should understand the data they possess, said Robert Daniel, senior director of product management and financial services at Integreon. “If you don't have good governance, everything after that is going to be difficult,” he added. “If you have good information governance, you know where your data is, you know what format [it] is, you know what got created, you know the age. All of those things go into supporting a good, reasonable, defensible, repeatable e-discovery process.”
All of a company's "risk partners" should be involved in data governance, said Daniel. “If you included three, but two didn't get involved for whatever reason, then your process isn't sound. It's not valid."
Paul Luehr, Manatt co-leader of AI, privacy and data security, said that while having everyone involved in data governance can be exhausting, tools exist that make the process more manageable. “One thing that will really help is to use technology to beat technology,” he said. In the current environment, “those of us who consider ourselves technologists can actually take some of these tools and not just make them defensible,” but “make them faster, because the tools can far outperform" a lot of people around a table "with a bunch of spreadsheets.”
Daniel noted that data deletion can help reduce litigation costs. “Not having the data is like the biggest cost savings that you can get ... [in] a legal regulatory matter,” he said.
“The data you don't have, you don't have to produce in a litigation,” agreed Fahad Diwan, Exterro director of product marketing. “You don't have it, so you're essentially deleting that risk in many ways, as long as you deleted data that you weren't legally required to retain.”
Diwan added that deleting data reduces storage costs. "If it's physical data, your storage costs are going to be reduced significantly," he said. "Even if it's digital data, the reduction can be sizable."