5 Tips To Keep in Mind for Data Privacy Day

No matter what industry you’re in, data privacy is an issue that impacts you. And when it comes to being safe online with sensitive data, whether that’s your personal data or sensitive data that is important to your organization, being informed is the first step. 

With that in mind, ahead of Data Privacy Day on January 28, we asked a handful of Netskopers from our CSO, internal security, and Netskope Threat Labs teams to provide tips around data privacy that they think everyone should know. Here’s what they said:

Manage data sprawl to better understand where your data is exposed

Privacy and data protection are a chief concern around the world and rightfully so. Data sprawl, or the way massive amounts of sensitive data is created, stored, and shared across enterprises, is very real and expands your attack vector and threat surface exponentially. Put in practices within your organization to slow data sprawl and continually track where your critical data is going. You can’t manage risks you don’t know about. – James Christiansen, VP and CSO Cloud Strategy

Utilize AI/ML capabilities to categorize sensitive data

Data privacy is about making sure you understand what data is most important and why. And whilst classification has traditionally been considered a key part of the path to this understanding, for many organizations it also can seem insurmountable. However, modern AI/ML capabilities can allow for automated categorization of a wide spectrum of data without the need for classification. This categorization, as part of a good security strategy, allows organizations to design optimal protection strategies for their most sensitive data with less of a headache. – Ilona Simpson, CIO EMEA

Take simple steps to keep your personal data safe

As individuals, we have the capability to do simple and easy steps to ensure our data is protected: managing our passwords, separating work resources and activities from personal ones, ensuring our machines are updated with additional measures installed, and many others. These acts alone will greatly help in mitigating the risks from activities that we might do, even accidental ones. – Clive Fuentebella, Threat Research Engineer

Ad blockers are key to keeping your data safe

Thwart the surveillance economy with an ad blocker! Ad blockers are widely available online and are easy to install and enable, often as an extension in the toolbar of your browser of choice. This way you can easily prevent invasive trackers from monitoring your movements about the web and from snooping on data you enter into web forms. – Steve Riley, Field CTO

Use consumer VPN services and password managers to your advantage 

My biggest tips for data privacy are: Use a consumer VPN service on all public internet connections. These VPN services can also help on private networks, as some are able to block web trackers as well. Use a password manager to ensure passwords are always complex and unique. And always check settings of services to reduce the amount of data you are sharing. – Allen Funkhouser, Information Security Analyst

What tips about data privacy do you think everyone should know? Connect with Netskope on LinkedIn and let us know!