Protect Your Personal Information: Ensuring Privacy and Security

Data is everywhere in the digital realm, on cell phones, tablets, PCs, and Macs. Even smart TVs, game controllers, and home appliances have data now.

With too much data being generated, should we protect all of this content or specific items relevant to protecting their personal security?

Everyone using smart devices must understand how data is generated and how long we should keep the data.

How can you determine if someone has compromised your data? You should subscribe to personal data monitoring services from IDStrong.com. IDStrong's ID scanning solutions can help users identify whether their email, phone number, Social Security number, or other online credential entities have been compromised.

Are you interested in knowing more? Click here today to learn more about IDStrong.com and its various offerings.

What is Data Protection?

Data protection safeguards information to ensure hackers and scammers do not access personally identifiable information (PII). Your credit card information, what financial institutions hold your money and investments, and your current home or work address are valuable data hackers target.

Hackers who want to steal credentials and impersonate their victims also target online privacy, specifically users with Amazon.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Microsoft accounts.

Not only do users need to protect their data, they also need to protect their login credentials.

Why is Data Protection Important?

Data protection is critical for users to ensure their data is not stolen. Hackers target personal data from external devices to impersonate their victims. Once a user's identity has been compromised, hackers will access their social networks and bank account information and troll through their victims' social and professional connections.

Ensuring your credentials are not stolen is a critical step in data protection.

Fundamental Principles of Data Protection

The roots of data protection lie in how and why data is collected. Users, especially in the European Union (EU), must grant consent before anyone, including social media, global technology companies, and financial institutions, can access and share their data.

This data includes e-commerce, travel, and banking sales transactions. These sites contain individual addresses, credit card numbers, and the products or services they have purchased.

Within any global and national privacy laws, these transactional sites need to abide by the general principles of data collection and protection.

Lawfulness

Before collecting any data from a user, the site needs to define why it needs to collect it, the relevance of the data collection effort, and what steps it takes to protect this data. Amazon.com is an example of a site that stores personal information, including the users' contact list, shipping addresses, previous sales information, and what products they added to their wish list.

Fairness

Communicating with users about why these sites collect and store data is essential for compliance and good business practice. Sites that use cookies must now pop up a question requesting permission to leverage cookies for session state or provide additional product recommendations. Using these pop-ups allows the user to opt out and block the user of cookies.

Transparency

Websites that use pop-up screens, provide user-acceptable guidelines, and allow users to block cookies are good examples of transparency regarding data collection. Defining the time data is stored within the site is essential to the website's communications.

Purpose Limitation

Setting a retention period and defining the purpose of collecting personal data is essential for websites to stay compliant and execute good business processes. The time data needs to be stored should coincide with the purpose of the data. Not all personal data from users needs to be collected. The site should purge or only collect some unnecessary data. 

Data Minimization

Collecting data specific to the executing commerce should have defined fields with their website. Each field represented in the inputs should have a rational purpose for collecting that information. Minimizing data collection helps protect the user and the website from reducing their overall attack surface. Collecting less data helps reduce the ability for hackers to compromise or impersonate their victims.

Accuracy

One critical component in data collection and protection is maintaining the integrity of the content itself. Hackers target cloud-based storage depositories to either steal or manipulate the data. Site owners ensure the accuracy of the data stays in its original form and is free from corruption.

Storage Limitation

Retention helps reduce the amount of data stored in depositories. Another critical setting websites need to enable is storage size. Suppose data collection activities extend beyond the physical or logical capacity. In that case, this should trigger several notifications to the website developers and storage teams to consider collecting less data or setting more aggressive retention schedules to remove unnecessary data.

Integrity and Confidentiality

Maintaining the integrity of the data also requires ensuring confidentiality to help with privacy and compliance mandates. Restricting access to the information only to personnel who need it is necessary to help with these mandates. Blocking access is critical to data and is essential for organizations mandated by various compliance and privacy mandates.

Common Data Protection Laws and Regulations

Compliance exists at a local, national, and international level. These mandates help ensure organizations follow their strict requirements for data access, sharing, and deletion. Many of these compliant mandates originated from a cybersecurity event, such as a data breach, business email compromise, or a CEO impersonation attack.

Specifically, the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU showed the unions' commitment to enforcing privacy laws and ensuring user data protection. 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

GPDR maintained that organizations within the EU or globally that collect, store, and transmit personal data need to request consent from the user directly. Without this consent, organizations may not store and share personal information.

GDPR also enabled severe penalties for organizations that fail to protect personal information.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Customer Privacy Act, or CCPA, followed a mandate similar to the GDPR. The CCPA mandates how organizations collect information from people living in California. However, CCPA differs from GDPR in that GDPR extends the ability for users to OPT-In and allow their data to be collected, while CCPA extends only the ability to OPT-Out.

CCPA also sets guidelines on the organization's size required to extend OPT-Out.

Other Global Data Protection Laws:

CCPA and GDPR are not the only privacy laws organizations must comply with.

Canada: The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)

“The PIPEDA governs personal data accessibility in Canada and focuses on organizations collecting personal data.” This privacy mandate also focuses on the purpose of collecting individual data and for how long.

Brazil: Brazilian General Data Protection Act (LGPD)

This protective law originated by mandating the collection of personal data within Brazil and strengthening the countries aligned with GPDR to help promote more international trade.

South Africa:  Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI)

Like other countries, South Africa aligned their privacy law with GDPR. The country created this law by defining the collection, storage, and sharing of South African citizens' personal information.

HIPAA USA: Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act

The HIPAA Act focuses on several important aspects affecting the medical industry. A significant part of HIPAA requires medical practitioners to safeguard PII information stored in electronic medical records. HIPAA also mandates a process for sharing patent information between doctors, hospitals, and insurance carriers. Failure to protect patient information results in huge fines and potential lawsuits.

Methods and Tools for Data Protection

Enabling a strategy to protect extended beyond technical controls. Protecting data is a mix of processes, procedures, and cybersecurity security controls. Organizations attempting to protect data without a strong alignment between the technical and process layers often result in security breaches.

Here is a list of proven adaptive security controls to help protect critical data:

Encryption

HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS (Credit Card) require encryption of all data in transit or at risk. This requirement also extends to email security. Any emails that send regulated data, including healthcare and financial information, must be encrypted.

Access Controls

Enabling multi-factor authentication is required for HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS compliance. Restricting access to the data, especially if the user's credentials have become compromised, is critical in maintaining a positive compromise status.

Data Masking

Data masking or data tokenization continues to become a vital protection control. Masking specific details, such as patient record numbers, credit card numbers, or Social Security cards, is required for HIPAA and other compliance mandates.

Data Backups

Data backup continues to serve several IT and cybersecurity requirements. HIPAA and PCI-DSS require encrypted data backups, which enable a disaster recovery site or failover. Data backup also provides quick relief against ransomware attacks. If an organization's data has become encrypted by a hacker using ransomware malware, CISOs, and CIOs can restore their data before the attack using backups.

Regular Audits and Monitoring

HIPAA and other compliance mandates require continuous monitoring, frequent assessments, and audits. Organizations must ensure their security operations (SecOps) resources are well-staffed and funded. These resources support continuous monitoring, automated incident response, and reporting.

The Role of Individuals in Data Protection

Even with the most advanced cybersecurity adaptive controls and security procedures, data protection comes down to the user making the right decisions, including:

• Enabling encryption of every email
• Do not reply to any suspicious emails
• Ensure you patch and update your devices.

Data protection starts with the user and organization understanding the importance of protecting this information. Users ultimately become the most critical layer in the data protection model. Users concerned about whether their credentials and personal information have become compromised should subscribe to monitoring services from IDStrong.com.

IDStrong can scan the dark web and other open sources to help users determine if someone has compromised their personal information.

Are you interested in learning more? Click here to check out IDStrong.com's offerings