Why is data privacy important for your data governance strategy?

1 What is data privacy?

Data privacy refers to the rights and obligations of individuals and organizations regarding the collection, use, sharing, and disposal of personal data. Personal data is any information that can identify or relate to a specific person, such as name, email, address, phone number, health records, financial details, preferences, behavior, and location. Data privacy laws and regulations vary by country and industry, but they generally aim to protect the rights of data subjects and impose responsibilities on data controllers and processors.

2 Why does data privacy matter for data governance?

Data privacy is essential for data governance because it affects the trust, quality, and value of your data. Data privacy helps you build trust with your customers, employees, partners, and regulators by demonstrating that you respect their data rights and protect their data interests. Data privacy also improves the quality of your data by ensuring that you collect only the data that you need, that you store it securely, and that you keep it accurate and up to date. Data privacy also enhances the value of your data by enabling you to use it for legitimate purposes, such as analytics, innovation, and personalization, without compromising the rights or expectations of your data subjects.

3 How to align data privacy with data governance?

To ensure data privacy is aligned with data governance, you need to adopt a holistic and proactive approach that covers the entire data lifecycle. This includes defining data privacy goals and policies, assigning roles and responsibilities, implementing data privacy controls and processes, and regularly reviewing and improving your data privacy practices. To do this, you must establish clear and consistent rules for collecting, using, sharing, and disposing of personal data in compliance with the relevant laws and regulations. You also need to identify and empower the people responsible for ensuring data privacy across your organization. Additionally, you should design and deploy mechanisms that enable you to enforce your data privacy policies and monitor your performance. Furthermore, you must evaluate and update your policies based on feedback from your data subjects, changes in the external environment, and insights from your metrics and indicators.

4 What are the benefits of data privacy for data governance?

Data privacy can bring many benefits for your data governance strategy, such as increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, reduced risks and costs, improved operational efficiency and effectiveness, and enhanced competitive advantage and innovation. Not only is data privacy a legal or ethical obligation, but it is also a strategic opportunity for your data governance. By respecting and protecting customers' data rights and interests, complying with data privacy laws and regulations, collecting and managing only the data needed to be used, as well as using data for legitimate and value-added purposes, you can ensure the quality, security, and value of your data assets. Doing so can foster long-term relationships with customers, avoid fines or lawsuits that may result from data breaches or violations, save time, money, and resources, gain insights to create solutions, offer personalization to differentiate from competitors, and meet the needs of customers - all of which can lead to business success.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?