Data Privacy Day ,known in Europe as Data Protection Day, is an international holiday that occurs every 28 January. Except in the UK!
The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. It is currently observed in the United States, Canada, India and 47 European countries.
Data Privacy Day’s educational initiative originally focused on raising awareness among businesses as well as users about the importance of protecting the privacy of their personal information online, particularly in the context of social networking. The educational focus has expanded over the past four years to include families, consumers and businesses.
In addition to its educational initiative, Data Privacy Day promotes events and activities that stimulate the development of technology tools that promote individual control over personally identifiable information; encourage compliance with privacy laws and regulations; and create dialogues among stakeholders interested in advancing data protection and privacy.
The international celebration offers many opportunities for collaboration among governments, industry, academia, non-profits, privacy professionals and educators.
Companies around the country in the security sector meanwhile were today joining policymakers in flagging awareness of Data Protection Day, which is aimed at raising awareness and promoting good data privacy practices around the world.
Four measures enterprises can take to ensure better data protection.
- Visibility – IT needs the tools to know where sensitive customer data resides, how it is being processed, and by whom.
- Security – must be aligned to maintain security and compliance.
- Integrity – IT must validate structured and unstructured data automatically, and ensure that stored data is intact.
- Recovery – Organisations must ensure data is recoverable in a timely manner in the event of any physical or technical incidents.”
This is the first data privacy day since GDPR has been in force and there is no doubt that analysing the effectiveness of the regulation will dominate the day and ultimately the year of GDPR