Coordinating Concepts of Data Privacy is a Challenge, Says Ethyca CEO
There are "subjective differences" in how those within the privacy team and the rest of an organization think about data protection Ethyca CEO Cillian Kieran said Wednesday during an Ethyca webinar. Terms like data mapping, data inventory and data labeling may have different interpretations depending on whether you’re talking to the privacy team, engineers or the legal team, he said.
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Organizations as a whole may also view these terms differently, Kieran said. For example, some use third-party vendors as context for data mapping, and focus on pixels and cookies and consent, whereas others spend more time labeling the data within their infrastructure.
“The result of this is that there is no one size fits all,” Kieran said. “Every organization has a very distinct philosophical view of what they're trying to accomplish and an outcome for the business. In concrete terms, though, what that means is the starting point is often very messy.”
What is important is "the context in which [certain pieces of information are] used for specific business, because that directly affects the degree of risk that that business and the individuals contributing data to it are exposed to,” he said.
Michael Melia, head of sales and marketing at Ethyca, noted the cultural, technical, managerial, communications and sales challenges involved in privacy. This approach has "changed how I think about this problem in terms of really selling the importance" of privacy to various parts of an organization.