Why You Shouldn’t Have To Trust Anyone With Your Data
It has become commonplace for users to have to provide personal information in order to gain access to a service. At the very least, to have an account on any website, the site wants a username and password to protect access to your account. At the other end of the spectrum, companies in the financial, medical, e-commerce, and public sector have vast repositories of data on users.
If organizations have a valid need to know every piece of data that they request and collect and if they respected the data by adequately protecting it and using it only when absolutely necessary, then maybe this vast collection of personal data may be understandable and even acceptable. However, neither of these are actually the case. Companies collect additional data to use for customer profiling and targeted advertising. In 2017, there were 1,579 data breaches where organizations lost control of personal data entrusted to them.
You shouldn’t have to trust anyone else to protect your data. The record clearly shows that organizations with custody of your data misuse it and lose it in data breaches. By embracing edge security, organizations can operate while allowing customers to remain in control of their own personal data.
Why shouldn’t you trust organizations with your data? Because they’ve demonstrated time and again that they are not to be trusted. The two main risks of providing personal data to an organization are that they will lose or misuse it.
The number of data breaches where companies lose personal data of their customers has exploded over the last few years. In 2017, there were 1,579 breaches of people’s personal information. This was a 44.7% increase over the number of data breaches reported in 2016 (which was also a record-breaking year). Data breaches have become more and more common as organizations collect massive repositories of users’ personal data, creating enticing targets for hackers.
Data breaches are not a problem of a single company, industry, or even sector. In 2017, the most famous breach was of Equifax, a credit monitoring company. Equifax was hacked, resulting in the loss of personal information of 145 million people. Breached information included names, Social Security Numbers, addresses and birthdates for all affected people and credit card information for 209,000 Americans.
Another breach showing that companies are not to be trusted with personal data is the
Uber data breach. In late 2016, a hacker breached Uber’s networks and stole information on 57 million Uber users and the driver’s license information of 600,000 American Uber drivers. Rather than report the breach (as required by law in Uber’s home state of California), Uber paid the hacker $100,000 in return for “assurances” that the data was destroyed (which may violate a US Federal Trade Commission law that prohibits the destruction of forensic evidence during an investigation).
Data breaches are not even limited to the public sector. In 2017, 57% of US government agencies experienced a data breach (up from 34% in 2016). This is the largest percentage for an industry (the average across all industries is 35%).
