If you work with data, you have certainly heard by now about GDPR: the new European Union laws surrounding consumer data privacy that went into effect May 25, 2018. But how about PIPEDA, NDB, APPI, CCPA, and SHIELD?
These acronyms represent data privacy regulations in other countries (in these cases for Canada, Australia, Japan, California and New York respectively). Many are new or recently expanded, and all are examples of how your legal responsibilities to customers don’t stop with GDPR. More importantly, they represent an opportunity for you and your business to use data quality and 21st century marketing practices to differentiate yourself from your competition.
Data protection and privacy laws are becoming increasingly popular
Let’s discuss some of these new regulations. According to authentication vendor Auth0, there are a wide range of reasons for their recent proliferation. First, the rollout of GDPR has implications for other countries, including whether their personal data can flow into the EU – meaning that their data quality and protection regulations must align sufficiently with EU rules to be “whitelisted” by them. New laws now being adopted by other countries address issues such as breach notification, the use of genetic and biometric data, and the rights of individuals to stop their data from being sold.
Moreover, data privacy and security doesn’t stop with Europe and GDPR. Other countries are now starting to explore the rights of consumers in this new era of online information gathering and big data. For example, Japan and other countries now have additional regulations surrounding the use of personal information codes to identify data records, and there is increasing scrutiny on personal data that is gathered through means such as social media.
Contact data plays a key role in compliance
Now, let’s talk about your contact data. It often isn’t ready for global data regulations, through actions such as not gathering country information at the point of data entry, or having onerous location data entry requirements (like putting “United States” at the end of a long pull-down menu of countries) that encourage false responses. Worse, existing contact data often has serious information gaps or incorrect information, and it goes bad very quickly: for example, nearly 20% of phone numbers and 35% of email addresses change every year.
Finally, let’s talk about you. In the face of a growing list of data privacy and security regulations, your job isn’t just to become GDPR-compliant. It is to build and maintain a best-practices approach to data quality, which in turn keeps you up to date with both today’s consumer data laws and tomorrow’s.
Data quality best practices are a competitive differentiator
Taking a step back from this flood of new regulations, we would also suggest that an ideal goal isn’t just compliance – it is to leverage today’s data quality environment as a competitive opportunity. Why do these new laws exist? Because of consumer demand. People are tired of interruptive broad-brush marketing, invasive spam, and unwanted telemarketing. When you build your own marketing strategy around better targeting, curated customer relationships, and respect for the consumer, your focus can shift from avoiding penalties to growing your brand and market share faster.
We can help with both of these objectives. For starters, we now offer our Country Detective service, which can process up to 500 contact records and append correct countries to them to help guide your compliance efforts. And for the longer term we offer a free Global Data Assessment, where our team will consult with you at no charge about strategies for data quality in today’s new regulatory and market environment. Interested? Contact us to get the ball rolling, and take the next step in your global market growth.
