In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the trend of marketing data consolidation, customer data platforms, and how marketers may be unknowingly violating multiple privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and COPPA in their quest for “one view of the customer”. Learn more about some of the regulations, what the penalties are for violations (including jail time), and how to protect yourself and your company.

Noteworthy links:

HIPAA

Marketing data and HIPAA

Understanding protected health information and personal data

COPPA

GDPR

CCPA

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http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-customerdatawarnings.mp3

Download the MP3 audio here.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this week’s in your insights, customer data is all the rage, how can we get more of it? How can we bring more of it into our systems? How can we get a Master View of the customer and collect as much data to train AI and machine learning on? How can we even do things like influence elections by gather gay people to install silly apps on their phone, send us photographs of themselves, and, and turn that into actionable intelligence. All of this sounds great. But it sounds like the potential to go really, really, really wrong. So Katie, talk us through this. What are the things that people are just not thinking about when it comes to customer data and this relentless pursuit of gathering as much information on people as possible?

Katie Robbert

Well, so a little bit of background, for those that don’t know, I actually spent the first half of my career well over a decade in the pharmaceutical and medical and regulatory space. And so I know lot about protected health information, personally identifying information, and then HIPAA, HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. And you know, so if you’ve ever been to the doctor, you typically have to sign some sort of a form saying that, you know, you understand your rights with HIPAA. And what that really means is that the medical professions will do their best to protect your personally identified information and your protected health information. And so where this comes into play with marketers, is, we’re so focused on collecting everything we can about customers and users and their behaviors and their demographics and, you know, their likes their dislikes, that we’re not really thinking about the bigger picture and what that means. Now, HIPAA, and all of these other regulations have been in place for at least 20 years in the healthcare space base. we’re now seeing this crossover into the marketing space. And so we actually saw an instance of this last week where someone we were working with a customer and there was enough identifying information, they, you know, took out names, they took out addresses, phone numbers, but there was still enough identifying information and health information about individuals in their database that it could have, had we not caught it been a HIPAA violation. And if you’ve ever experienced a HIPAA violation, it’s nasty is expensive. And it’s not something that you ever want to experience. And marketers are not equipped to go through these things, healthcare companies, it’s expected marketers, not so much.

Christopher Penn

But wait a minute, a man. So let’s say I’m a, a widget manufacturing company, I manufacture left hand, left hand to smoke shifters. HIPAA doesn’t apply to me, I’m not healthcare company.

Katie Robbert

And so that’s where there’s a lot of misunderstanding, HIPAA actually does apply to you. HIPAA applies to