Data privacy regulations to protect 63% of the world by 2023

Gartner has predicted that 65% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations by 2023, up 10% from 2020.

Nader Henein, Researcher Vice President at Gartner, stated that with more countries introducing modern privacy laws in the same vein as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the world has reached a threshold where the European baseline for handling personal information is the de facto global standard.

“Lawmakers are introducing new privacy laws that seek parity with the GDPR. These regulations allow whole countries to move one step closer to achieving adequacy with the EU, where their local businesses can benefit from a larger market with their new ‘trusted’ status,” said Henein.

The findings revealed that while some organisations focused on cost optimisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, they must incorporate the demands of a rapidly evolving privacy landscape into their business’s data strategy. “Security and risk management (SRM) leaders need to help their organisation adapt their personal data handling practices without exposing the business to loss through fines or reputational damages,” said Henein.

SRM leaders should adopt key capabilities that support increasing volume, variety and velocity of personal data by introducing a three-stage technology-enabled privacy program: establish, maintain and evolve.

The establish stage includes foundational capabilities of a privacy management program, which are necessary for any customer-facing organisation that processes personal information. These include discovery and enrichment, which enable organisations to establish and maintain privacy risk registers.

In the maintain stage, organisations can scale their privacy management programs, with capabilities focusing on ongoing administration and resource management. These include augmenting incident responses to address breaches of personal data and bringing automation to privacy impact assessments.

The evolve stage includes specialist tools that focus on reducing privacy risk with minimal impact on the data utility. In this stage, organisations can extract insight about their consumers from large pools of data without exposing them to excessive privacy risk. This is a critical feature for marketing teams.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Blue Planet Studio