Forbes Technology Council has said a national data privacy regulation could save companies time and money and help them focus on business success and customer satisfaction rather than get lost in the maze of privacy regulation and compliance.
We completely agree.
Most commentators agree the US data privacy regulatory landscape is shambolic. Only California, Colorado and Virginia have passed state laws, while a raft of other state regulations are on the table but not yet passed. A national data privacy law was looking promising earlier this year but is now widely considered a way off.
But the Forbes Technology Council points out the already heavy compliance burden (financial and operational) on businesses will only increase when these laws pass. Compliance with the CCPAand the GDPR is proving hugely costly, according to PwC, since laws worldwide differ just enough to demand businesses stay aware of their obligations and implement the systems they think will be protective enough across all regulations or at least the most challenging one.
Forbes says the hardest hit will be the mid-market enterprises and non-profit organizations that don’t have the resources to keep up.
Forbes rightly asks: “How will businesses manage the nuanced differences among them, and how much time will this take? Will they face multiple fines for the same incident? What happens if the regulations have conflicting provisions? Does any company really want to restrict business activity while it wastes time in court defending how it struggled to resolve conflicts between different privacy regulations?”
Everything points to the solution being a unified, national data privacy law, to bring cohesion to an otherwise time-consuming and resource-intensive mess.
We are seeing some data privacy progress in the US, such as President Biden’s cybersecurity executive orders and more privacy-oriented commissioners appointed to the Federal Trade Commission.
Forbes says businesses are suffering dreadful inertia and doing nothing or very little while they wait for a national law, which will hurt both the business and its customers in the long term, especially via major data breaches which aren’t reducing in size or frequency. Data breaches not only put consumers at risk; they make consumers doubt companies and governments and increasingly reject the data surveillance business model and data access consumers don’t like or trust.
Forbes says businesses that do try to do the right thing pay for it in development costs and legal fees as they flounder around trying to work out which requirements are important to their business.
It’s a no-brainer then when Forbes concludes “… only a sensible national privacy regulation” can help businesses to see which technologies and processes they need to protect both their business and their customers.
And, as we do here at Anonyome Labs, Forbes reminds companies it’s still up to them to stay vigilant and proactive in protecting their customers’ data privacy while the country waits for the national data privacy law saga to come to a successful end.
One of Forbes’ suggestions is for companies to “build a top-down, data-driven culture of privacy based on zero trust, data encryption and the ethical use of data.”
And that’s where Sudo Platform can help. Sudo Platform is the complete privacy and cybersafety toolkit for integrating next generation identity protection and privacy into your brand’s products and services.
By leveraging Sudo Platform, you can:
- Put market-leading privacy and cybersafety tools for communications, collaboration, and commerce right into your customers’ hands.
- Give your customers control over their personal data and empower them with unprecedented privacy and safety.
Photo By Andrii Yalanskyi
