"Beyond Encryption: Protecting Consumer Privacy While Keeping Survey Results Accurate"
Local governments, marketing agencies, social media companies, and other types of organizations continue to collect data while assuring anonymity and confidentiality. However, existing data privacy laws do not ensure the prevention of data breaches in that these laws only require data to be encrypted before it is shared with external parties. Researchers suggest that organizations take a more conservative approach to consumer data privacy by transforming original data to protected data before it is shared within the organization. Internal actors, such as employees, were behind a significant portion of data breaches that occurred in 2019. There have been cases in which employees stole data from their former organization to share with a new employer. In a recent paper published in the Journal of Marketing Analytics, researchers from Drexel University and Vanderbilt University proposed a new technique to permanently modify survey datasets in a way that protects consumers' privacy while maintaining the accuracy of these datasets when data is shared. Their proposed methodology is based on a technique used in genomic sequencing applications. This article continues to discuss the collection of consumer data by organizations, the inadequacy of existing data privacy laws, common threats to data privacy, the proposed methodology that protects consumer privacy while preserving accuracy, and the research behind this technique.