| | December 2017ENTERPRISE SECURITY8A New Vocabulary for the Digital AgeIt's no secret that the English language has already begun expanding rapidly to keep up with the digital age. Words like "selfie," "wearable," "hash tag" and "Bitcoin" have all entered main stream parlance.Your familiarity with these terms might be the difference between a successful product launch and an FTC investigation. For CIOs, however, I'd offer a new set of terms that are vital for organizations looking to successfully navigate the frothy seas of our increasingly online world. They are terms privacy professionals find themselves using on a daily basis and your familiarity with them might be the difference between a successful product launch and an FTC investigation.Here are just five with which you should become familiar to help you identify potential blind spots in your organization's data collection and data use practices.AggregationIsn't Big Data great? With modern processing power and algorithms, we can uncover all sorts of new insights by compiling data and interrogating it.Unfortunately, bad actors have this power, too. What this means is that what might seem like a pair of innocuous databases might, when combined, reveal unintended things about your customers or employees, so they might need more protection than you think.The privacy community learned this lesson almost 20 years ago, when the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission released de-identified health records in an effort to spur medical industry innovation. A smart researcher named Latanya Sweeney combined the data with publicly available voter registration data and was able to identify Governor Bill Weld and his entire medical history.ConsentThis term is quite simply foundational to doing business on the Internet. If you're collecting someone's data, you will find that legal obligations in various countries ­ and in some cases, just plain good manners ­ require consent to do so.Aaron's learned this the hard way. The rent-to-own franchise surreptitiously installed software on computers they were leasing that allowed for the tracking and monitoring of user behavior on those computers. The idea was to prevent theft. The result was a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive trade practices.Yes, data has value, and it can be tempting to collect it whenever you can. But customers value their data, too. Make sure you know the applicable law, and get their permission, or By Trevor Hughes, CEO and President, International Association of Privacy ProfessionalsIN MY OPINION
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