It’s been revealed in an inspector report that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has lost the data of millions of taxpayers. According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IRA has proven unable to account for the location of millions of taxpayers data stored on microfilm. The report further explains that the microfilm backups, which were stored in Ogden, Utah, were not “adequately safeguarded”.
This is worrying for many reasons, as Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York states. Safeguarding those data was described as not a priority. However, Tenney counters that losing the sensitive data of millions of individuals is a priority.
What is the worst that could happen? The truth is that confidential data used by federal agencies contains information about people’s identities, including :
- Names
- Date of birth
- Postal address
- Social Security numbers
This level of information, if it falls into the wrong hands, could be used for identity thefts and frauds. In other words, just as Rep. Tenney mentions, losing federal data will never not be a priority. This is alarming, and more importantly, it is even more worrying because governmental agencies refuse to either take the blame or consider the risks associated with data management.
Yet, while customers are not in a position to blame federal agents, they can certainly show their displeasure to businesses that fail to take data protection seriously. The reality of data security and data privacy is that customers, the owners of the data, can, at any time, walk away and sue for data breaches. While individual violations may not come with high fines, there is no denying that times are changing and one day, the fines will reflect the importance of confidential data.
Truth be told, businesses are far from being defenseless in the face of data theft and data breaches. In fact, if anything, businesses have also had access to all the data protection tools they needed. But few have chosen to implement them.
What do customers expect to see when it comes to protecting their data?
More often than not, it doesn’t come to the extent of data theft. Customers and employees alike, worry about the unnecessary exposure of confidential data to third parties or individuals who are not qualified or authorized to access the information. This happens on a daily basis in offices, when an employee shares documents or scans with other members of the team. While some data on file may be suitable for sharing, there is a growing call for using redact features to hide confidential and non-necessary information. This could be, for instance, used to remove applicants’ photos, names, and dates of birth during the recruitment process to keep it bias-free. Similarly, sensitive customer data that are not relevant to a specific work project could also be redacted out before sharing files. Data privacy and data protection discussions, surrounding the launch of the EU GDPR policy, have reached the US mindset, and encouraged many Americans to consider their rights when it comes to safeguarding their own data.
The GDPR debate, while it doesn’t affect US customers, does affect US businesses that are reaching out to the European market. For countless businesses, the choice has been to ignore GDPR requirements by blocking access from all GDPR-following countries. Yet, this does include the EU and the UK, which means that businesses are at risk of losing a huge market potential.
Why exclude GDPR customers? The answer is simple and straightforward. Excluding GDPR customers means that the business has no need to be GDPR-compliant. While it makes sense in the context of small US ventures selling at a national level only, there is no denying that data privacy and protection concerns are on the rise. It is only a matter of time before the United States also implements a GDPR-like policy. This begs the question of how far businesses will be ready to go to stick to their ways and further disregards their customers’ data privacy rights?
As Saryu Nayyar explains, in the US “personal information on individuals is collected with every click on every app […] As the internet grows, so, too, does this data harvesting.”
Yet, this leads to the gradual erosion of personal privacy, potentially leading to more and more incidents such as the IRA intentionally shushing the loss of millions of data by claiming that it does not matter. Why doesn’t it matter? Because millions of Americans have been trained, over the years, to freely provide their confidential data online. But like the dogs trained as part of Pavlov’s experiments, the training is likely to come at a high cost as digital data becomes more and more prevalent in our day-to-day lives and identities.
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