TikTok is now under investigation for allegedly breaching the UK’s data protection law – the latest casualty in a long trend. It hasn’t been a good year for data privacy and big tech. The likes of Uber, Samsung and Instagram have all got hit with hacks, regulatory fines or both.
The safest way for companies of any size to ensure they don’t get into trouble over mishandling private data? “Don’t store unnecessary personal data in the first place,” says Private AI CEO and Co-Founder Patricia Thaine. “But if you have to, there are ways to automatically safeguard this data.”
Private AI’s solution automatically detects, redacts and replaces 50 different types of personally identifiable information in over 42 languages. That helps companies make the data they collect compliant for international privacy regulations like GDPR, CPRA, and HIPAA.
With the number of data breaches surging in the USA by 68 percent last year, big companies are looking for solutions to help them safely handle the huge volumes of data they need to run their businesses. Compliance regulations limit how much of that data businesses are able to collect, store and access.
Over 80 percent of respondents to a survey said they were concerned about data privacy, according to recent Cisco research.
“Compliance transgressions not only impact the company’s revenue but it can lead to serious reputation damage,” Thaine says. “What we can do right now using AI is automatically redact the personal information that your company has in the first place.”
About 90 percent of all the world’s Internet data has been created since 2016. Big tech giants like Meta and Google have been collecting huge amounts of that data, but they’re not alone. Small businesses have been getting into this game for years.
At the same time, over 90 percent of surveyed small business leaders admit that it has never been harder to keep sensitive data safe. A majority in the same survey did not believe that their employees knew how to prevent breaches – creating urgency for making data safer in the instant that the data is collected.
“To safely unlock the valuable insights from your business data, you must first identify and protect the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) within, but identifying PII in unstructured data is hard,” Thaine explains.
So many companies either rely on inaccurate solutions that leave them at risk or fail to safely and effectively monetize their data, she added.
