To look at the types of actions that businesses should be taking, Digital Journal caught up with Rick Farnell, who is the President and CEO of Protegrity, a data security company. Farnell has experience with helping to incubate, fund and scale startups in the AI market. The advice comes as a timely reminder for Data Privacy Day.
According to Rick Farnell: “This year’s Data Privacy Day marks a unique milestone in the maturity of online privacy. For decades, security has been focused on perimeter defenses, such as stopping attackers from getting through networks, endpoints, and applications.”
This was fine once, but things have changed has Farnell explains: “However, these measures – and even old-school methods like coarse-grained data protection – are virtually ineffective when it comes to providing a meaningful assurance of privacy for the billions of human beings on the planet. On this Data Privacy Day, we as an industry should go forward with the knowledge that fine-grained data protection will be critical for the future of online privacy.”
Central to the measures that need to be taken are with digital technologies and a transformation of businesses culture, as Farnell explains: “Over the past year, the pandemic has fast-tracked digital transformation, AI, and data analytics timelines for many companies – far beyond the level of innovation that would have happened under normal circumstances. This has forced businesses to reckon with the age-old struggle between the freedom to innovate and the level of control required by IT.”
The most important technological step, according to Farnell is artificial intelligence, as he outlines: “Without a doubt, AI will be the next frontier of innovation for businesses across the globe. However, while AI is poised to radically improve the lives of every person on the planet, privacy concerns remain. For businesses to finally unlock the full potential of AI, they must first find ways to become responsible caretakers of their customers’ sensitive information.”
Pulling his analysis together, Farnell loops back to Data Privacy Day: “To this end, I believe that the organizers of Data Privacy Day have selected a very apt theme for businesses this year: ‘Respect Privacy.’ Privacy truly is a fundamental human right and necessitates human-centric solutions to protect the people’s data and enable organizations to be responsible data stewards.”
