In an article for Business Spectator on Lord Justice Leveson’s Sydney speech last week, I looked at the commercial aspects of privacy, an area that was overlooked in the reporting of the two Australian lectures by the British jurist.
Privacy is a serious issue which is also being overlooked by boardrooms, possibly because it’s often conflated with IT security and so it’s seen as a technology problem and, to be honest, executives see it as being a bit ‘soft’ and airy-fairy.
Sony’s humiliations in 2011 with a series of embarrassing privacy breaches that left the company’s reputation in tatters show the real and embarrassing risks in not taking privacy seriously.
The UK prank phone call scandal is another example of poor privacy policies which have real world impacts on both the hospital’s patients and staff, whether the management there is held to account or even learns any lessons remains to be seen.
In California, the US state with the strongest privacy laws, Delta Airlines is being sued over its smartphone app’s policies however the state itself isn’t immune from serious breaches.
Giving away social security numbers opens up all sort of identity theft opportunities although any privacy breach exposes the victims to potentially serious consequences, some of that pain is going to be passed onto those who give the information away.
The worry for businesses is that in the absence of serious action by governments and the private sector, the evolution of privacy law is going to take place in the courts with unpredictable and inconsistent results.
As we now have the tools to gather, store and process huge amounts of data about our customers and staff, we also have an obligation to protect it. This is something managements need to understand and take seriously.