It’s not just “free” social media sites. Some subscription-based sites track what consumers regularly purchase, then mark up the prices on those items because they know another purchase is likely. Data broker sites, like Spokeo and Whitepages, even require users to pay a fee to view the complete “data dossier” they have on a consumer. They compile the data from public sources, some of which may be unknown to the consumer. Then the consumer is asked to pay for it for company profit.

We should be focused on driving an environment centered on full transparency and active participation, one where consumers can easily (and freely) access, understand and know with certainty how and when their data is being used. And this should be happening across all industries and sectors, whether a company serves consumers directly or partners with other businesses that utilize consumer data as a part of their platform’s experience.

At Flueid for example, our SaaS platform uses traditional and nontraditional data sources to help our clients make decisions and streamline the real estate transaction process from end-to-end. We intentionally designed data security at the core of our architecture and instituted processes and protocols to facilitate the use of data in accordance with its intended and permissible purpose.

We also don’t store or aggregate any data within our system and encrypt every transaction placed through our platform at the individual order level. This means that data stays with the Flueid client, inaccessible to anyone else or other clients, for any other purpose—giving the customer the secure and private experience they have a right to expect.

Where do enterprises go from here?

Many enterprise customers likely do believe their data is protected—until it’s not. Year over year, millions of consumers are snared in data breaches, and 2021 set a new record with almost 50 million victims. We’ve learned, as enterprise executives, that we can make security breaches more difficult, and we can mitigate their impacts, but we can’t entirely eliminate them. However, allowing consumer data to be collected without optimum barriers surrounding that data, and then sold multiple times without the customer’s knowledge, repeatedly exposes that customer’s data in places that catch the customer unaware when a breach happens This is ultimately because the customer never knowingly agreed to let their data travel to such places in the first place. Or at least, their opt-in was vague and confusing enough that they signed that right away.

Providing the optimum customer experience requires us to do better. It’s our shared responsibility to ensure data protection, regardless of the extent to which data is used within a platform. We need to put more secure barriers around the customer data we collect; submit to regular audits to gain SOC 2 Type 2 certification to gain and keep customers’ trust; and automate security checklists to reduce human involvement, thus minimizing human error. We must adopt a business model of transparency in how you use—and protect—your customer data in a format that is plain and easy to understand.

In other words, it’s essential to put barriers around your customers’ lives that prevent anyone from going into the inner sanctum of their daily lives, including you, without their permission.

There will be a day, and it’s likely coming soon, that customers are going to value enterprise transparency and customer empowerment more than “optimization” as key to their overall customer experience. They will demand to not just know where their data goes, but also to have a say in their data end game.

If we as enterprises don’t hold ourselves to higher standards, if we don’t agree to industry benchmarks when it comes to protecting not just customer data, but also our customer’s rights to that protection and privacy, we will ultimately find ourselves bound by legislation that denies us opportunities to grant the ultimate customer experience by our own business criteria.

Instead of finding ourselves knocking on customers’ doors with no one answering, let’s all—enterprises, technology, e-commerce companies, and app developers alike—do our part in protecting consumer data. We can innovate without imposing a weight of solicitation and secrecy on the backs of our customers.