Data Analytics for Small Businesses: How to Manage Privacy Risks

Perhaps you’ve been hearing about data analytics, which is being promoted as a way for even small businesses to analyze communications with customers, enhance customer experience, save money, and ultimately improve your brand. However, data analytics can have big privacy implications.

You may think of managing privacy risk as protecting sensitive customer information, such as credit cards. As the Venn diagram to the right demonstrates, data security is certainly one aspect of privacy risk, but privacy risks can also arise by means unrelated to cybersecurity incidents. People can experience problems or adverse effects simply from the way organizations use data for business purposes. These “privacy events” can result in a range of problems from customer embarrassment if information is revealed that they didn’t anticipate, to more tangible harms, such as discrimination or economic loss.

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

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