More is known about the average person than ever before. Today, organizations can access astonishing amounts of information about their customers.
Few people are happy about that.
Customers’ reactions run the gamut from unease to outrage to acquiescence, raising prickly questions about whether organizations—nonprofit as well as for-profit—are behaving responsibly as they collect, use and often share data. There’s also the tangible issue of the risks to an organization’s reputation if that organization breaches customers’ trust by losing or exposing any of their customers’ data without their say-so.
These issues have ramifications for business leaders as they seek to balance the push to capture, evaluate and extract value from customer data with the need to master privacy issues. In fact, Accenture believes that it is now possible to see the beginnings of a “privacy economy”—one in which data is essentially a tradable asset.
In the privacy economy, a company’s privacy practices can become a competitive differentiator, and service providers and consumers share responsibility for appropriate protection of data. In the future, best practices won’t be driven solely by compliance efforts; instead, companies will become “co-regulators,” self-monitoring in nimble, practical ways to help fill gaps where conventional regulation can’t keep pace.
The privacy economy is very much new territory, and there is clear evidence that consumers are much more concerned about data privacy issues. And, thanks to regulators and social media platforms, they are able to make companies that overstep the bounds pay.