After myriad of data privacy breaches compromising billions of personal data records, the residents of the world’s 5^th largest economy, California, welcome the long-awaited California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). One of the most comprehensive data privacy laws in the history of America, CCPA will be effective from January 1, 2020. This law gives the people of California the right to know categories of personal information processed by organizations, and to monitor its usage and sharing. They can demand access to, and deletion of their personal data as well as revoke any sharing & selling rights.

Non-compliance to data privacy laws can lead to serious consequences for the organizations. In case of a personal data breach, the impact for an organization far exceeds the financial penalties, which averages up to millions of dollars per incident; they also end up losing the customers’ trust and loyalty. Rebuilding their confidence will take an enormous effort, which makes the case for investment in data privacy program much stronger.

Design for Privacy

As the organizations prepare themselves to meet the challenges of a digital future, they cannot afford to overlook customers’ privacy and security concerns. The demand for enhanced data privacy measures will continue to grow and governments around the globe will continue to respond with their own laws. Organizations looking to thrive in this data privacy era need to build an extensive data privacy program that can satisfy and scale-up to the requirements of the existing and upcoming laws and improve customer experience.

PowerMe, a Data and Analytics Management platform helps organizations in building a foundation for a robust data privacy management program, by tackling the two most important data privacy challenges:

1. Data integration and personal information identification – The first step in building an effective data privacy program is to break down data silos by connecting all the data sources to create a single source of truth. PowerMe’s ML-powered capabilities automate the data source integration process and enable stewards to locate personal data, quickly and accurately, for establishing privacy controls.
2. Understand enterprise-wide data consumption and lineage – The consumers can demand complete transparency and control on the usage of their personal data by organizations, their vendors, partners and third parties. PowerMe gives a clear understanding of who owns the personal data, how it was created, when it was last accessed and how they are authorized to use it. In enables organizations to trace the data from its origin to its consumption and build a graphical view, which includes transformation logic, ETL processes etc., of the entire data lifecycle.

Thinking beyond data privacy To succeed in their digital initiatives, organizations need to focus on building a data privacy-centred business strategy. This is the right opportunity to create data ecosystems that support compliance with data privacy laws and grow their brand value through an exceptional customer experience.