Privacy and data protection

The five-point plan for data privacy & business

On Friday I attended a talk at Data Protection 2016 that was all about – you guessed it – data, but specifically how businesses can continue to thrive in the ever-evolving data economy.   

The talk from Ctrl-Shift CEO Liz Brandt covered five key action points that business and government need to tackle together in order to avert a future crisis.

I’m going to cover them in detail in this post.  

Three is right to declare war on ‘irrelevant and excessive mobile ads’

Just when you think things can’t get any worse for the publishing industry, somebody goes and hammers another nail in its coffin. 

Well, it’s not quite as dramatic as that. But recent news from mobile network provider Three certainly got the ad industry talking over the weekend. 

The network has announced that it will roll out ad blocking technology on its network after initially trialling it in Italy. 

Start Me Up! People.io allows people to monetize their personal data

Despite consumers becoming more comfortable inputting data online over the past decade, 2015 saw mounting pressure on crappy ad formats, data resellers and unsolicited communication.

It’s in this context that people.io launches today, a platform that allows consumers to benefit from giving away their personal data.

We caught up with the team…

Six examples of data-value exchange between brands & customers

The NSA, the ‘snooper’s charter’, the PPI phone-call haranguing, the Ashley Madison and Talk-Talk hacks (and many previous); none of these seem to affect the growing willingess of consumers to trust brands with their data.

Trading data for something of perceived value is simply a fact of life when using ecommerce and the broader web, whatever you think about cookie legislation.

How will privacy by design principles impact web development & UX?

One of the many significant changes being introduced by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the requirement to adopt principles of privacy by design (PbD) when creating or revising processes or technology.

Given that websites are regularly being redesigned and developed, often by out-sourced agencies, it is quite likely that when the requirements become law, web development projects will be the biggest, most immediate category of impacted software development activities.