As the world becomes increasingly digitised, companies are amassing large amounts of data and increasingly reliant on it to fuel their businesses. The phrase often uttered is"data is the new oil", thought to be coined in 2006 by British mathematician Clive Humby.
In October 2018, advocacy group Privacy International published an article highlighting its concerns about the data Lenddo collects through Facebook. On the flip side, author and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez dismissed thinking of data in the same way that one regards oil, or suggesting that people should receive"dividends" when companies use their data . This shows a misunderstanding of how Internet giants like Google operate, said the former Facebook employee in a WIRED article.
Insufficient focus on data privacy - the control of how personal data is used - imperils not just individuals but the startups themselves. In the book 99 Privacy Breaches to Beware Of, authors Kevin Shepherdson , William Hioe and Lynn Boxall discuss how lax data privacy practices could throw a wrench into a startup's plans.
"The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he had said, implying that the company would not do anything considered too insidious. Near co-founder and chief revenue officer Shobhit Shukla says the company only shares aggregated analytics information with customers and partners. Additional steps it takes to ensure the data's privacy, security and authenticity include stripping the data of any personal identifiers and hashing it.
Singapore-based credit scoring startup CredoLab is another firm hoping to edge out competitors by paying keen attention to privacy. It uses smartphone metadata to score users. Using metadata means that, for instance, information about a digital image - its size, resolution, or date of creation - can be assessed without seeing the image itself.
The act specifies that they must, among other things, safeguard the confidentiality, security and integrity of credit information. The act will also apply to startups that carry out credit reporting for profit or gain, even if it is not part of their core business. No definite date has been given for when the act will come into force.
"Imagine the data economy of Singapore becomes so good that you have jobs created, you have new streams created for the company, and the consumer can benefit from hyper personalisation," says Mr Bhupatiraju. The lack of data protection policies and failure to obtain consent of individuals were the other two most common PDPC obligations breached.
Mr Sachkov recommends startups appoint experts with an extensive cybersecurity background to their advisory board. When on a tight budget, bug bounty programs can be used to find and fix security vulnerabilities, he says. Take, for instance, the widespread belief that anonymising data can help protect the data owner's privacy. It doesn't, says Reza Shokri, a researcher at N-CRiPT who specialises in data privacy and trustworthy machine learning.
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