Helping Keep Personal Data Safe

By Kirsten McMullen, Global Privacy Compliance Program Manager

The mission of Data Privacy Week, observed January 24-28 this year, is to inspire dialogue and empower individuals and companies to respect privacy, safeguard data, and enable trust. With the exponential explosion of online data gathering, the ‘Data Privacy Day’ was expanded to a week this year—giving people more time to learn how companies collect and use personal information.

Everything you do online generates data. Every time you shop, click, scroll, like, message, play and more, you are generating data. This personal information has tremendous value to businesses. The landscape of privacy and data protection laws and regulations, both around the globe and in the U.S., continues to grow more complex. Companies with global operations that wish to advance the privacy rights of individuals and enable innovative products and services must both comply with these laws and deliver meaningful data security to their customers. This can be challenging for many companies and even harder for people when trying to figure out if the apps and companies that hold their data are keeping it safe.

At NortonLifeLock, privacy and user trust are central to our business. We focus on five essential elements to help keep customer data safe. As you review the apps and companies that have your personal information, check for these key practices: 

1. Accountability. At NortonLifeLock, we hold ourselves accountable by defining our principles, conducting internal and external audits, empowering employees at all levels of the company to proactively consider privacy and data protection, engaging in continuous improvement processes, and constantly scanning for new risks and opportunities. For more details on NortonLifeLock’s Privacy Operation Model, see page 14 of our 2021 ESG Report. 

2. Security. We secure personal data using appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Our security monitoring alerts us to suspicious activity, and we have a robust incident response program. 

3. Essential rights. We take a principles-based approach, going beyond regional data protection laws to provide essential rights to our customers, such as access and deletion, regardless of whether there is a law requiring it. 

4. Transparency. Privacy policies are often difficult to read and understand and we work to make ours as clear but also as detailed as possible. We provide additional support articles and easy access to contact information to make it easy for customers to exercise their privacy rights and get their questions answered. 

5. Customer-First Privacy by Design. In everything we do, we strive to anticipate, identify, and prevent invasive events before they happen. Privacy measures should not be add-ons, but fully integrated components of the system. We only collect personal data for specified, clear, and legitimate purposes, and we only collect as much personal data as we need to achieve those purposes. See our Global Privacy Statement for more information on our Personal Data processing practices and our Product and Service Privacy Notices for more on how Personal Data is collected and used.

This Data Privacy Week, we encourage you to do a quick review of the companies and apps that have your information. Do they have systems and policies in place to keep your data secure? Are they explaining what personal data is collected and why? Remember it’s your data and it has value. Be selective about who you choose to do business with and thoughtful about what information you are providing. We wish you all an informative Data Privacy Week!