What does "data enrichment" mean from a privacy perspective?
What does “data enrichment” mean from a privacy perspective?
Are you familiar with data enrichment? In marketing, audience data is probably the most important asset and we all know that quality beats quantity almost every time.
Today, we have more reliable data and the capability to dive into data at granular level to analyze the customer. That’s why data enrichment has come to play.
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing, refining, and improving raw data, helping firms to create more robust profile of every contact in their CRM.
Sadly, data enrichment firms are still largely unregulated and legal protections for our personal data are lacking.
Researchers Diachenko & Troia just discovered that an open Elasticsearch server has exposed more than 1.2 billion data-enriched profiles to the open internet, containing detailed info that provide an exhaustive view of individuals.
If accessed by cybercriminals, the data could be used for highly effective targeted phishing attacks and identity theft, among other things.
Anyway, this is not a data breach per se and data was legitimately scraped by the two firms, but it brings up a question: what does this kind of “data enrichment” mean from a privacy perspective?
After this revelation, it’s clear that after Cambridge Analytica, privacy practices have not moved forward, Diachenko noted.
