Data privacy issues arise when an organization collects information and processes it in a way that violates individuals’ rights. Examples of this include unauthorized access, disclosure, or use of personal information that has been collected without consent, violation of an individual’s right to be forgotten, and unintentional loss or destruction of personal data.
In a world where we live in a digital economy, businesses are accumulating and processing a massive amount of personal customer or user information. As such, it is critical that they are transparent with their customers or users and uphold their privacy policies to avoid legal challenges and reputational damage in the wake of a data breach.
Student data privacy is also an issue for many schools as they shift from paper records to more tech-dependent systems that track attendance, performance, and assessment. This increase in data collection and storage requires universities to comply with regulations set by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) among others.
This includes maintaining strict security measures like encryption which converts sensitive information into scrambled text that is only decipherable by authorized individuals and continuous data protection which combines backups of a dataset into one file, allowing it to be retrieved from any point in time in case of a breach. Another important practice is data minimization which ensures that organizations only collect the personal information that they need for a specified purpose and that they do not continue to process it beyond what is necessary.