Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
It’s a data privacy world, and we’re living in it.
Americans report feeling helpless about their personal information—so much so that as much as 48% feel that they don’t know how to protect their data online, according to a recent survey from YouGov. The report also found that 62% of Americans feel worried about how much of their information is exposed.
Work the solution. That’s not a surprise to Rob Shavell, co-founder and CEO of Abine, the parent company of DeleteMe, a personal information deletion service. Shavell told IT Brew that in his view, the helplessness is connected to the way that the harms and effects of personal information are “hard to define.”
“Most people, when faced with a problem that is hard to define and hard to figure out a solution for, just ignore it,” Shavell said.
State central. Lawmakers have advocated for years for stronger data privacy protections. On Oct. 18, the Department of Justice proposed a rule “prohibiting and restricting certain data transactions with certain countries or persons.” The rule, meant to protect Americans from having their personal information sold to adversaries, is part of the implementation of an executive order from President Biden in February “to protect Americans’ sensitive personal data from exploitation by countries of concern.”
But, as Shavell said, there’s still more to be done. While he emphasized that he didn’t condone overly prescriptive state intervention, Shavell said that he wanted to see action that would lock in the US with other countries and regions like Brazil, India, and the EU in data protection. That would allow the market to step in within those parameters, he told IT Brew.
“I’d look to the government to make sure that they are not beholden to the special interests of the big tech companies and the data holders and the credit bureaus and everyone else that can pay them huge amounts of money through lobbyists and other other vehicles and corrupt what fundamentally should be simple—which is just make the ability for people’s data rights to be actioned on and to be made easy,” Shavell said.
He added that the issue is also one of simplification and time. It’s unrealistic to expect consumers to be able to manage the changing data landscape.
“People should have data rights when they express a preference,” Shavell said. “That preference should be respected by the people that are holding their data.”