YOUR COMPANY COULD BECOME THE NEXT BIG PRIVACY SCANDAL IF YOU DON'T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT QUICKLY.

AuthorAndra, Jacob

BECAUSE OF THE FACEBOOK SCANOAL, 87 MILLION PERSONAL PROFILES WERE COMPROMISED, BREXIT WAS ALLEGEDLY INFLUENCED, AND DONALD TRUMP'S 2015 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN PURPORTEDLY BENEFITED FROM SOCIAL TARGETING.

2018 was the year of digital privacy awareness. Filled with publicity around the lack of any meaningful privacy in the digital realm, people learned they can no longer assume that large corporations have reliable custody of their personal data. Businesses, for their part, were set on high alert--or so we can hope--to 'not be like Facebook' with customers' personal information.

Speaking of Facebook, last year saw the social media behemoth hemorrhaging one bad revelation after another. Most notably, the Guardian's/New York Times's exposure of the years-long Cambridge Analytica affair led to the demise of the latter. But not before 87 million personal profiles were compromised, Brexit was allegedly influenced, and Donald Trump's 2015 presidential campaign purportedly benefited from social targeting based on said data.

Such "increased attention brought to digital privacy issues," says cybersecurity expert Jake Hiller, motivates companies "to stop and think about how they handle the digital privacy of their client and employee data." Rather than jumping on the "chastising bandwagon,"--a default response when it's another company's metaphoric derriere in the hot seat--"we should be looking at the reflection in the mirror."

Subsequent to the Facebook imbroglio, Mr. Hiller has had "a few clients want to look at how to tighten up their security and change policies." As the owner of IT and cybersecurity firm Intelitechs, Mr. Hiller consults a lot of Utah firms of various sizes. He says that "in general, Utah companies are ahead of the curve" regarding technology (including an awareness of the importance of digital privacy).

Mr. Hiller attributes Utah's proactivity to the "Silicon Slopes" initiative, which brings "a lot of attention focused here in the tech space." Whether or not Utah is really ahead of the curve, complacency is always the enemy, and Matt Lowe says that good digital hygiene requires continuous vigilance from companies. "Don't ignore it and think that it doesn't apply to you."

Mr. Lowe serves as the executive vice president at MasterControl, a SaaS company that provides a suite of corporate governance and compliance tools across a variety of sectors. He says that "digital privacy has always been at the forefront to us," but after the...

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