Today is #DataPrivacyDay2020. A time to reflect on the global progress of laws for the protection of personal information, to acknowledge the achievements we've made and recognize the challenges we have yet to overcome. It seems, however, that most of the world is only focused on the latter. The data breaches, the abuses of power, the disregard for personal privacy and autonomy in our decisions as human beings. So, I wanted to take a moment to call out some of the positive things that can often be overlooked in fearmongering and click-bait headlines regarding privacy.
Exhibit A is a recent story regarding Ring. A few weeks ago, it was widely reported that Amazon fired four employees working for their Ring division who abused their authorized access and spied on customers. Despite the fearful headlines, I learned from these articles that Ring has a policy of restricting access, appropriate logging to determining if access was appropriate for an employee's job obligations, and a process for addressing complaints and disciplining employees who abused their authority.
Exhibit B is Facebook. OK, maybe they're Exhibit A because it does seem like every privacy news headline involves Facebook. Facebook's recently released tool shows you all of the data, and the sources of that data, the company has about you. Much of this data is provided to Facebook by third parties for the purpose of marketing those third party services. As much as people complain about the extent of this information, it is Facebook - and not the third parties who actually did the data collection and sharing - that is making this information available. Is it overwhelming to think of how much data Facebook has about people? Yes. But it is also amazing that they are building transparency tools to let users know this information, including who is actually collecting the data about them to share with Facebook, such that individuals don't have to independently track all the companies that they share data with to get an idea of what their complete online profile looks like. And it's important to recognize that the companies sharing that data with Facebook are also likely to be sharing it with other advertising platforms - yet there is no media outrage that those companies have no similar disclosures to Facebook.
These news stories provide, on their surface, stories of invasions of privacy and failures to keep large amounts of data from being aggregated in a manner rife for abuse. But it is easy to overlook the internal practices that caught the abuses and the technology development to provide transparency regarding sources of data. On this privacy day, consider the good things that are being done and ask how you can implement those good practices. So, this Privacy Day, let's examine and role model the good practices in privacy, even if the only reason we know about them is because more bad than good happened.
We can still learn. We can always learn.
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