Frontline Technology Announces Commitment to Respecting Data by Becoming a 2022 Data Privacy Week Champion

This year’s initiative emphasizes educating businesses on data collection best practices that respect data privacy and promoting transparency. 

[Alpharetta, GA] January 07, 2022 — Frontline Technology today announced its commitment to Data Privacy Week by registering as a Champion. As a Champion, Frontline Technology recognizes and supports the principle that all organizations share the responsibility of being conscientious stewards of personal information.

Data Privacy Week is an expansion of Data Privacy Day. It takes place annually during the last week of January. It generates awareness about the importance of privacy, highlights easy ways to protect personal information, and reminds organizations that respecting privacy is good for business. This year, we are encouraging individuals to learn more about how to manage and protect their valuable online data. We are also encouraging organizations to respect data and learn about the keeping individuals’ information safe from unauthorized access and ensuring fair, relevant, and legitimate data collection and processing.

According to a Pew Research Center study, 79% of U.S. adults report being concerned about the way their data is being used by companies. As technology evolves, data collection is becoming harder to avoid. It is vital that organizations are open and honest about how they collect, use, and share personal information.

The National Cybersecurity Alliance has offered up the following tips to help guide individuals and organizations to better data privacy practices, such as:

For Individuals:

• Understand the privacy/convenience tradeoff: Many apps ask for access to personal information, such as your location, contacts, and photo album, before you even use their services. This personal information is sold by some developers and allows some to offer their services at little to no cost. Make informed decisions about whether to share your data by considering the personal information an organization wants and weighing it against the benefits you receive. Be thoughtful about who gets your information. Beware apps or services that require access to information that is not required or relevant for the services they are offering. Delete unused apps on your internet-connected devices and keep others secure by performing updates.
• Manage your privacy: Once you have decided to use an app or set up a new account, check the privacy and security settings. Modify them to your comfort level for information sharing. Each device, application, and browser you use will have different features to limit how and with whom you share information. Get started with NCA’s Manage Your Privacy Settings page to check the settings of social media accounts, retail stores, apps, and more.
• Protect your data: Data privacy and data security go hand in hand. Keep your data secure by creating long, unique passwords and storing them in a password manager. Add another layer of security by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible. MFA has been found to block 99.9% of automated attacks when enabled and can ensure your data is protected, even in the event of a data breach.

 For Organizations:

• Conduct an assessment: Assess your data collection practices. Understand which privacy laws and regulations apply to your organization. Follow reasonable security measures to keep individuals’ personal information safe from inappropriate and unauthorized access and make sure the personal data you collect is processed in a fair manner and only collected for relevant and legitimate purposes.
  • Don’t forget to consider partners and vendors. If someone provides services on your behalf, you are also responsible for how they collect and use your consumers’ personal information.
• Adopt a privacy framework: Researching and adopting a privacy framework can help you manage risk and create a culture of privacy in your organization by building privacy into your organization. Get started by checking out the following frameworks: NIST Privacy Framework, AICPA Privacy Management Framework, ISO/IEC 27701 - International Standard for Privacy Information Management
• Educate employees: Create a culture of privacy in your organization by educating your employees and volunteers of obligations to protecting personal information. Educate staff on your organization’s privacy policy and teach new employees and volunteers about their role in your privacy culture during onboarding. Engage staff by asking them to consider how privacy and data security applies to the work they do. Teach staff and volunteers how to update their privacy and security settings on work and personal accounts. Learn more.

 For more information about Data Privacy Week 2022 and how to get involved, visit https://staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-week/.