Why the use of privacy-enhancing technology promotes consumer data privacy and protection

Enterprises across a wide variety of industries use location data – and the insights derived from it – to solve a variety of business challenges. These include reaching the right audience with ads, deciding where to open a new physical location, understanding where there are obstacles in their supply chain, and more.

Despite the many benefits of location data insights for the average person, consumer data privacy remains a top priority. As a result, companies often struggle to strike the right balance between using data to discover meaningful insights while ensuring consumer privacy.

A growing number of companies are using location data

Location data is a powerful part of strategic business capabilities such as customer personalization, acquisition, insights and retention. And this information is being used by more companies in more ways than ever before.

A rideshare company that navigates to customer pick-up and drop-off locations, a web application that offers local dining options, or a mobile app that allows a consumer to see news or football results – all use location data. The trends and insights gleaned from this data can also help companies make critical decisions, develop strategies, and generally improve their business.

But by capturing consumers’ location data, companies become immediately responsible for handling this data properly, regardless of how it was collected or whether it is shared outside the organization. Additionally (whether they are aware of it or not), companies with apps that collect location data are likely in possession of data generated in sensitive locations such as health centers, places of worship, military bases or schools. This data could be accidentally sold, used for analysis, accessed by a malicious person, or revealed during a data breach – all institutional risks of dealing with precise location data.

This is why any company that captures or processes consumer location data in any capacity should use privacy-enhancing technologies to ensure that their own consumer data privacy and protection efforts not only meet consumer expectations , but even surpass them. While fully understanding the importance of consumer privacy and access to the types of tools needed to protect data can be a steep learning curve, there are ways the location technology industry can help.

Addressing the learning curve by democratizing access to privacy-enhancing technologies

Traditionally, proprietary privacy enhancing technologies have been developed by location technology companies and used internally. However, I firmly believe that if organizations of all types are to make real progress toward the level of consumer data privacy that people want and expect, privacy-enhancing technologies developed by location technology companies must be made available to all companies that benefit from these benefit from progress.

New efforts to democratize access to privacy-enhancing technologies are helping organizations ensure that location data generated by mobile devices in sensitive locations is not used, shared or resold. These tools help add industry-leading privacy controls to a company’s own systems and work with all types of location data, regardless of how it is generated. This helps ensure that a company is compliant with privacy requirements and protects consumer data.

If more technology companies made the privacy-enhancing features used in their own systems available to other companies, organizations across all industries could better protect the data stored in their systems, and in turn consumer data privacy and protection would likely improve. increase and improve faster. A crucial starting point is the democratization of access to these technologies.

The changing landscape of location data and consumer privacy

While there is no lack of debate about what could happen if someone’s sensitive data falls into the wrong hands, there is a lack of awareness about what the loss of location data could do for businesses and society at large, should the world no longer have access to it. Location data can help solve business challenges, but it can also help solve challenges we face as a society, such as understanding how a virus spreads within a community or identifying evacuation routes in an area where a natural disaster has occurred so that aid that can reach those who need it most. However, this data should still be collected with privacy in mind.

Look forward to something

Location data isn’t going anywhere, but privacy protection practices will continue to evolve as companies face new customer demands and legislation, and as new sources of location data emerge, such as autonomous vehicles and new smart devices. Consumer privacy is now the responsibility of every business, so it’s more important than ever that every business that handles consumer data uses privacy-enhancing technologies to ensure consumer data is protected.

Jeff White is the founder and CEO of Gravy analysis.