Data privacy? Data Security? Is it my problem?
30 May 2019
30 May 2019
I listened to a fascinating talk at the Quirk’s London event in February this year. This was given by Greg Clayton (Kadence International) and Finn Raben (ESOMAR) and was on the subject of data ownership and perceptions of ownership.
Greg and Finn ran a research study looking at the views of marketing professionals in the UK, USA and India and some of the findings were extremely surprising.
Starting with the good …
Something that REALLY shocked me was that decisions about data seemed to be made in the IT department.
There was also generally a poor understanding of legal issues, including ownership of the data that’s been collected.
These findings reinforce the fact that many organisations still aren’t handling data correctly.
A year ago, it seemed that everyone was in GDPR meltdown. People who hadn’t been handling data in an ethical way were having to delete whole chunks of their databases, or they were spending time and money gathering consent in order to ensure their databases were compliant.
BUT market researchers have been dealing with data for decades – it’s what we do, all day every day.
We have an ethical code of conduct (ESOMAR and the Market Research Society have their own codes).
We have always been transparent about what we are collecting data for and how we will use it.
We are the data experts. And we are needed more than ever.
We can help in several ways –
There is still a lot of work to be done. But as the data experts, we must continue to shout out loud about the importance of maintaining data privacy and security.