Customers’ Privacy is Worth the Cost of Regulation

Doing the right thing after doing the wrong thing for a long time can be difficult and costly.

This morning I read a round up on the first year of GDPR and a short article about Senator Feinstein’s bill to protect voters from digital manipulation ala Cambridge Analytica. There is also the Nevada digital privacy law and California’s upcoming privacy regulation to plan for.

This requires a whole new job, the Digital Protection Officer (DPO). It requires companies to comb through databases to make sure that they don’t have any data that is against the law now. It’s costly and painful.

But, I think most people in the industry think that it’s worth it. A lot of us have been surprised by what the industry has done and gotten away with because it was legal and because users had a lot of trust in the big tech companies. Behavioral advertising has gotten pretty invasive because it was legal to be invasive and if your company didn’t invade privacy for the sake of better ads performance, some other company would.

Now we have to do a lot of work to get back to where we should have been to start with. But, we all know deep down that treating our users, customers, prospects, and ultimately all people the way they want to be treated online is the right thing to do. So, it is worth it.