Privacy legislation has been on the horizon for almost as long as security legislation. Every year, digital tracking techniques get better (or creepier, depending on your perspective). What if all these privacy rules/regulations actually came to fruition? What does “controlling your data” really mean – for the end user and corporations alike?
It’s hard to imagine what the internet would be like without advertisement supported projects like the Google search engine. That search engine is good because it uses data from a variety of sources to improve it. Microsoft uses data from Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and its operating systems (e.g. Windows 10) to “improve user experience.” LinkedIn uses data about users to bolster professional networks (and in many cases social networks). What if all the data about your enterprise – including all your users—was configurable by you, and Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, nation states, hackers, data brokers, etc. couldn’t see any of it. Maybe you’ve never thought you could control your enterprise user data to that extent … but we help make that happen.
There are speculations on what the technology landscape could look like when you start to control your own data, including this recent article from CMS Wire. The author mentions that some cookies are on the chopping block (3rd party cookies specifically). Fortunately for big tech they already have workarounds. Facebook has been allowing 1st party cookies for a while now but back-end data sharing agreements (which you probably agreed to with the Terms of Service) will continue to be a ripe source of data. Unfortunately for the end users, there’s really no functional change in the data that is exposed, stored, mined and monetized — even with GDPR and CCPA in full effect.
Truly controlling your enterprise data, including effectively masking your external enterprise footprint, is what we at Grey Market Labs enable with our Opaque platform. We expose privacy controls that administrators can understand and integrate with your existing infrastructure. Opaque is your “easy button” for digital privacy to the outside world (i.e. outside your corporate footprint). Sometimes you need to control what users within and outside your organization have access to. We recently announced a partnership with Virtru to bring their TDF-enabled encryption and access controls to Opaque. Share data from within our platform to a user in another cloud, manage their access as desired, and get full audit of when they access it. If you need more granular controls (such as preventing a user from copying text you shared) you can share the data to have it open within Opaque directly – completely clientless. Our Virtru integration is a welcome layer of our defense in depth strategy.
