Google GDPR Fines Underlie the Importance of Taking Data Privacy Seriously
You might have seen that Google was recently fined roughly $57 MILLION dollars for some of its customer data collection in France, under the tenants of the new GDPR legislation. Now, 57 million may be chump change for a gigantic company like Google, but this fine (the largest of its kind to date) is setting a serious precedent: all of us in business need to take customer data privacy management very seriously.
Apart from the potentially business-crippling fines, the simple fact is that properly managing your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) is the right thing to do. Not only does it remove you from legal and financial risk, but it sends a message to the customer that you take their privacy and security seriously. It’s just good business.
Now, a CRM system can have A LOT of customer data that can be considered PII. So it may seem a daunting task to manage such high volumes of PII – but using your CRM as your customer data privacy “Hub” of sorts can actually help ease the management of customer data privacy requests.
If you truly use your CRM as the customer interaction hub, the customer record can be more centrally managed – and data deletions and audit trails around such deletions can be easily stored and viewed to insure compliance. What’s more – using the CRM as a gate-keeper – by using a trusted Data Privacy management module like the one we have in Sugar – you can insure that once a customer has opted out of you storing their data – it is less likely to be added or stored due to controls built into the system, such has blank value placeholders (slot fillers of sorts) that show users and the system itself that PII should not be added in certain fields for this individual.
There are a lot of other reasons for managing data privacy requests in your CRM, but the main reason is convenience. Data privacy managers can have a simple, intuitive interface with which to view, process and report on privacy requests. (Well, that is if you’re using Sugar’s Data Privacy Module, the only one of its kind).
Ultimately, what we are seeing with Google’s heavy fine, and continuing legislation is that the issue is only going to become more pervasive. GDPR was only the beginning, and you need all the help you can get to stay compliant. For those using Sugar and interested in some data privacy tips and tricks, check out our Community pages on the topic.