Over the past few months I’ve been creating some social media marketing privacy guidelines and requirements for a couple of my large clients. Today I read a post from a fellow IBM Midsize Insider contributor, Jason Hannula, “Social Media: Enterprise Content or Customer Relationship Information?” It stated that “93% of marketers are using social media for business.” A large number of these are from small and midsize organizations. It is important for these organizations to not only keep Jason’s suggestions in mind, and follow the business’s data governance requirements, but also to make sure privacy is also appropriately addressed. Many, perhaps most, small to midsize businesses do not yet have social media privacy requirements in place. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘privacyprof’
Avoid this Common Privacy Choice Mistake
Monday, August 25th, 2014Many marketing professionals have a common temptation; they want to send as many marketing messages to as many people as possible, and they would love to send it to all folks who have ever been customers or clients of their business, and often times actually want to simply send to everyone whose email address they can obtain in any way.
Privacy professionals make many efforts to guide marketers on what is acceptable and not acceptable. After all, (more…)
Security is Action…Privacy is the Result of Action
Thursday, July 31st, 2014What is the difference between security and privacy?
Many of my clients are small and midsized businesses. They often express confusion over what each of these terms (neither of which have a universally-accepted definition) actually means, how they are different, and how they are similar. This is important for business leaders to understand so they can make appropriate decisions within their information security and privacy management programs. Especially in small and midsize businesses, where there may not be a specific position to address either of these important topics. Let’s start with considering at a high level the differences between information security and privacy. (more…)
Businesses are Also Synthetic ID Theft Targets
Monday, July 21st, 2014Early this month I was happy to discuss synthetic identity theft on the Great Day show. I briefly talked about how synthetic identity theft was also committed in the U.S. using business employer identity numbers (EINs). Crooks often target small and midsize businesses for this type of crime. After the show I got a lot of questions asking for more information about synthetic EIN identity theft. (more…)
10 Big Data Analytics Privacy Problems
Thursday, June 26th, 2014Big data analytics are being used more widely every day for an even wider number of reasons. These new methods of applying analytics certainly can bring innovative improvements for business. For example, retail businesses are successfully using big data analytics to predict the hot items each season, and to predict geographic areas where demand will be greatest, just to name a couple of uses.
The power of big data analytics is so great that in addition to all the positive business possibilities, there are just as many new privacy concerns being created. Here are ten of the most significant privacy risks. (more…)
Using “Compliant” Stuff Doesn’t Result in Full Compliance
Wednesday, June 11th, 2014In the past couple of weeks I’ve spoken with five different small to mid-size organizations who have had a software or hardware vendor basically tell them, “Our product is HIPAA compliant! Use it and you will also be fully HIPAA compliant!” How can that be? In three words; it can’t be. Here’s what is most likely going on with those claims. (more…)
Privacy Lessons from Snapchat
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014There are many new small and mid-size business start-ups who are offering a wide range of online services, mobile apps, and smart devices. There are also many businesses that have been around a long time that see an opportunity and so are expanding into these areas. I’ve spoken with many such businesses, and they often make two common privacy mistakes: (more…)
Lessons from 3 Organizations That Made 3 Privacy Mistakes
Wednesday, May 21st, 2014Even with the number of privacy breaches increasing, and with numbers of privacy sanctions coming from the FTC and other regulatory agencies and courts snowballing for companies doing irresponsible things with personal information, putting growing numbers of individuals at risk of identity fraud as well as physical safety risks, companies are still asking for way too much unnecessary and sensitive personal information purely for their marketing purposes.
And too many online media outlets, often reporting on or promoting these marketing efforts, are perpetuating these very bad privacy practices. Then, so they will not upset their advertisers, they actually are deleting comments that point out how bad those marketing and data collection practices are. I recently just experienced such a situation with (more…)
Rx for Incorrect Compliance Claims and XP
Thursday, April 10th, 2014In the past couple of weeks I’ve gotten a couple dozen questions from my clients that are small to midsized covered entities (CEs) or business associates (BAs) under HIPAA, in addition to several small to midsized start-ups that provide services in other industries. And, while some of these concerns are arising out completely erroneous advice, regrettably, some of the questions resulted from my own mea culpa of writing a confusing sentence in my last blog post, for which I’ve since provided a clarification within. (Lesson: I need to spend more time double-checking/editing text prior to posting after doing edits to cut the length.) I apologize for any confusion or alarm that may have arisen as a result.
However, this does provide a good opportunity to examine in more depth the compliance issues related to Windows XP use, and the related questions I’ve received. The following are the most common questions I’ve answered in the past several days. (more…)
Will the Demise of XP Shut Down Your Business…or Heart?
Tuesday, March 25th, 2014If you haven’t heard yet, Windows XP will no longer be supported after April 8, 2014. That’s just a couple of weeks away! Why should you even care? Well, because you may have an important, or even mission-critical, computing device you use for your business, or for personal use, that is running on Windows XP. According to NetMarketShare at the end of February, 2014, 30% of all folks using Windows desktop computers were still running Windows XP. This is around ½ a BILLION computers, folks! After support ends, (more…)
