In the first two chapters, I introduced the basics of privacy and what it means for your business. We then built a mental model that connects privacy to trust and safety, so that rather than an altruistic abstraction, privacy becomes a critical business goal.
- Its power to identify individuals
- Its abundance, thanks to ubiquitous internet connectivity, universally accepted IDs like Google, Facebook, and other device IDs
- Its ability to shape and influence behavior by way of machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Its potential to create often irreversible harms if used inappropriately or exfiltrated
Since protecting user privacy is critical for your company to maintain trust with users and maintain credibility with regulators, media, and privacy activists, it follows logically that your privacy-related efforts need to focus on data. To protect data from being used incorrectly in a way that hurts privacy, engineers need a holistic strategy on how best to understand data. The first part of that strategy is data classification.