When you work in product management, you are chiefly concerned with advancing the development of a software solution. If you think about that term – software solution – you’ll notice that one concept is at the core of that: solution. At the end of the day, my work at RADAR revolves around helping privacy professionals articulate problems and work with my team to find solutions.

That’s why I find it so important to keep a pulse on the pain experienced by our customers, the challenges they face, and the very real outcomes for their organizations if they do not find the right solutions for their privacy issues. This week I pulled together a few recent news items and research studies that illustrate the very real consequences of poor privacy practices:

  • Privacy professionals in Australia this week are celebrating Privacy Awareness Week, an initiative run by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities forum. The OAIC also released their quarterly breach report, revealing that over 10M people were hit in one data breach earlier this year and that health information breaches accounted for just over one quarter of all notifications.
  • The Internet of Things is back on the privacy radar – not that it ever really left. A recent Ponemon Institute Study revealed that IoT-related data breaches have increased substantially, noting that “the actual number may be greater as most organisations aren’t aware of every unsecured IoT device, application, or third party platform.”
  • Illustrating the importance of handling data breaches efficiently and compliantly and the very real impact on a business’ valuation is this recent deal to buy Independent News & Media at what some consider to be too low a price, brought down in part by a continuing data breach scandal.
  • WhatsApp, a popular messaging app that promotes itself as secure with end-to-end encryption, is urging its users to install updates of their app after the company suffered an “attack [that] targeted a ‘select number’ of users and was orchestrated by ‘an advanced cyber-actor.’”

If you’d like to share what privacy and data breach news is currently on your radar, we would love to hear from you at [email protected].