Championing Data Best Practices for a Responsible Future
By Sarah Spradling, Director of Privacy, Alliance Data
Data Privacy Week is an annual international effort to spread awareness about data privacy and educate individuals on how to secure their personal information. It’s also an opportunity to encourage businesses to respect privacy and be more transparent about how they collect, store and use data. Data Privacy Week 2022 (January 24-28) spotlights the value of information and how to “Keep It Private” and “Respect Privacy.”
At Alliance Data, data privacy and protecting personal information are major tenets of how we responsibly do business year-round, taking great care to respect privacy, safeguard data and build trust both internally and externally. We encourage all our stakeholders to take the following steps to safeguard their information:
- Understand the privacy/convenience tradeoff: Many accounts ask for access to personal information, such as your geographic location, contacts list, and photo album, before you even use their services. This personal information has tremendous value to businesses and allows some businesses to offer you their services at little to no cost. Make informed decisions whether to share your data with certain businesses by weighing the amount of personal information you are being asked to share, against the benefits you may receive in return.
- Manage your privacy: Once you have decided to use an app or set up a new account, check the privacy and security settings on the app or web service and set them to your comfort level for information sharing. Each device, application or browser you use will have different features to limit how and with whom you share information.
- Protect your data: Data privacy and data security go hand in hand. Keep your data secure by creating long, unique passwords and storing them in a password manager. Whenever possible, enable multi-factor authentication (MFA), which requires additional verification, like a PIN or fingerprint, to access your devices or accounts, especially those with sensitive information. MFA has been found to block 99.9% of automated attacks.
As a business, Alliance Data follows privacy and cybersecurity frameworks provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which help us create clearly defined policies on how we collect, retain, use, and protect personal information. Our associates receive annual privacy awareness training, which includes topics on best practices as well asrole-based information to help associates keep data privacy top of mind in their day-to-day work. We are proud to be a 2022 Data Privacy Week Champion by putting an emphasis on data privacy best practices. For more information, visit staysafeonline.org or read Alliance Data’s Privacy Statement.
