Last year, Time magazine discussed the illusion of privacy in the digital age. Technology, ranging from our PCs and tablets to smartphones and surveillance cameras, is capturing our every move and, in many cases, almost our every thought.

Commercial Exploitation

The Big Data analytics movement seeks to leverage this data for commercial purposes – to understand what we are thinking, what we want to buy, or how we may be tempted to spend more or to spend what we have in a different place or through a different channel as discussed in last week’s discussion around big data governance and Target

Privacy is mostly an illusion

Time Magazine

Protecting Personal Information

And yet, even as governments step up their invasions of privacy through aggressive surveillance, they are simultaneously seeking to protect our privacy by legislating how personal data should be collected, stored, accessed and used.

The South African Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA), for example, was signed into law in November 2013. In 2023, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development Affairs was the first institution to be fined for failure to comply with the Act.

PoPIA is built around data governance

Robert Frost’s famous poem, Mending Wall, discusses the importance of boundaries in maintaining relationships.

It is important to understand that the PoPI Act goes beyond data security to include elements such as information quality and accountability.

Several key elements of boundary-related metadata should be documented in order to ensure compliance with PoPIA.

These include:

•        Where is personal data stored?
•        Who has access to it?
•        For what purpose is it used?
•        Is the quality sufficient?
•        Who is responsible for it?

If these questions are answered and documented you will have kick-started your data governance program whilst ensuring that the key policies related to PoPIA have been complied with in your environment.

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