Data Enrichment: Is It Legal? The Answer is YES, And Here Is Why!
Searchbug, Inc.
Find the people and contact data you need because missing data is bad for business!
Marketers looking to promote products and services, generate leads, and prospect for new clients will find leveraging data sets and building optimized contact lists to be essential.
To accomplish such a goal, businesses turn to third-party providers that offer data enrichment. Data enrichment is the practice of adding complementary data or data which is necessary but missing, to existing datasets.
It's the easiest way to fill in the gaps of what's missing and use the data gathered to boost businesses' bottom lines. However, this service is being put into question. Is data enrichment legal? Does it violate data privacy law?
Laws Governing Privacy Protection???
You probably have heard about GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is considered the toughest privacy and security law in the world that has sets of rules around how companies can collect, use, and process personal data.
Are you affected by this law? It depends. This law was initiated and passed by the European Union. It has a goal to protect all EU residents from unethical data collection. The GDPR imposes obligations on organizations anywhere in the world that target or collect data related to people located in the EU.
So, if you are a US-based company and you do business in European countries under the EU, then you are obligated to follow GDPR guidelines before you get potential fines up to tens of millions of euros.
But if you are a US-based company only targeting a nationwide audience, and want to use data enrichment services, then you needn't worry about violating GDPR.
However, there are also state and federally-practiced privacy protection laws to observe. While there is no one comprehensive federal law that governs data privacy in the U.S., there are many regulations at the state and federal levels that cover different aspects of data privacy.
Here are some state and federal laws that you should observe:??
Is Data Enrichment Legal In The US????
Well, to answer the question once and for all, Data Enrichment is legal BUT there are limitations on how data will be used and how businesses access data.
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Generally speaking, Data Enrichment doesn't violate any privacy protection laws. In fact, there are a lot of data companies in the US that offer data enrichment services. As the world advances and consumer behavior affects businesses, the demand for accessing intelligent data increases.
The pieces of information that data enrichment companies have in their database are also from public sources that anyone can access. What they do is act as a bridge to fill what's missing on the datasets that businesses already have.
Access to data becomes illegal when data sets were sourced by adding information about someone that was acquired without their consent.
When Data Collection Becomes Unethical???
For example, if you're selling marketing software, it's probably acceptable to scrape CEO's company email addresses from LinkedIn, but scraping marital status information from Facebook wouldn't be appropriate.
Additionally, visiting someone's profile to see whether they have pets, what their job is, or anything that can predict consumer behavior. These types of data, though helpful to target through ads, are considered unethical as they were sourced from spying or without consent.
Also, these datasets are not used to perform effective customer service and communication with customers.
Conclusion???
Hopefully this clears up any confusion about whether data enrichment is legal in the United States. May this serve as a friendly reminder to source data ethically and work with reputable data companies that practice responsible use of data.
Before deciding which third-party data enrichment service you would like to use, find out first if they are part of alliances that honor data privacy.
Recently, Searchbug joined the Responsible Data Alliance to ensure the protection of at-risk individuals. This proves its commitment to the responsible use of data and its vision to help the community by uplifting businesses, reuniting families, solving cases, and protecting the identity of people that are facing threats and harassment.
To know more about data enrichment and the recent alliance of Searchbug and RDA, visit our website today!