Digital privacy: importance, advantages, and disadvantages

Digital privacy has evolved as new technologies have disrupted the so-called information societies. It’s crucial to understand it to respect the rights of your users and keep their personal information safe from cybercrime or unauthorized use. 

Having a confidentiality strategy increases the trust of your customers and workers, as respecting their privacy affects the dignity and freedom of individuals. 

Aware of its extraordinary relevance, we want to share with you the importance of digital privacy. Still, we also want to address its advantages and disadvantages to help you understand the implications and challenges arising in using the internet and digital environments.

What is digital privacy?

Digital privacy is a right that seeks to guarantee the protection of the personal data of users who access a service through the internet. It must ensure that they can know, decide and control the treatment that will be made of their personal data collected on a website, application, or social network. 

In this way, it must be ensured that the personal data of a person or company that uses those means are not accessible to other users without prior authorization or consent to consult, download, and/or use them. 

In the search for the security of personal data, differential privacy is becoming increasingly relevant.

What is differential privacy?

Differential privacy is one of the tools that you can use to improve the confidentiality of your company or project. It is part of what is called Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET). 

These technologies are based on different mathematical and computational mechanisms to extract value from commercial, scientific, or social data of interest, but without risking the privacy and security of personal data collected through information abstraction strategies.

Why is digital privacy important?

The importance of digital privacy is evident through the legal framework that collects rights and obligations regarding data protection from two guidelines:

1. On the one hand, through Directive 2002/58/EC on privacy and electronic communications.
2. On the other hand, through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Likewise, these documents manifest the severe risks that not protecting privacy can cause to people and may expose them to dangers such as:

• Identity theft.
• Bullying or cyberbullying.
• Introduction of viruses into their systems.
• Use of personal images for sexting, child pornography, etc.
• Intellectual property theft.

Online platforms must ensure privacy on the internet by guaranteeing that personal data is only collected under strict security conditions and used only for legitimate purposes.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of digital privacy and security?

Addressing the advantages and disadvantages of digital privacy and security allows you to delve into its implications, in addition to helping you be aware of how decisive it can be to have this strategy in your project.

Advantages of the digital privacy strategy

Having tools that ensure the protection of your users’ data results in numerous benefits:

• Ensuring respect for the rights and freedoms of your users.
• Increasing the competitiveness of your services and internal processes.
• Avoiding information security breaches and improving document management through better data control.
• Guaranteeing the data’s integrity, confidentiality, and availability and its continuous updating becomes a differential factor.
• Increasing the trust of your teams, customers, and suppliers.
• Respecting legal obligations regarding the protection of personal data.

Disadvantages of not having a digital privacy strategy

The drawbacks of not implementing a protection strategy of this type are numerous and can have consequences of different nature that affect your reputation and the rights of your users:

• Legal consequences related to criminal, civil, and labor liability.
• Disclosure of business secrets.
• Significant economic sanctions.
• Impact on operations that can be affected by system failures, human errors in data manipulation, etc.
• Risk of cyberattacks if personal data is vulnerable.

All these disadvantages result in severe damage to the image of your project, its visibility, and credibility, even compromising its continuity.

How to protect your digital privacy: the importance of automation

At this point, and as we have been discussing along these lines, having a strategy that ensures digital privacy in your company is necessary.

In that sense, process automation can become a great ally to help you avoid human errors in handling these delicate data or possible security breaches.

To achieve this, you can automate audit reports and regulatory requests or use automated identity controls to manage access to your platforms, personnel selection processes, or training, creating secure and respectful environments thanks to a remote supervision system or proctoring, for example.

At Smowltech, we have developed a series of flexible and scalable proctoring products that also provide parameterizable reports of your digital processes, effectively and simply complying with the GDPR.
Request a free demo to share specialized solutions with you and ensure that your procedures’ privacy does not become a source of concern but rather an added value.