There’s no doubt that there are massive benefits to the digital world that we live in. I can pick up the phone and connect with a friend who lives thousands of miles away. I can schedule a meeting for work in five seconds by pulling up Google Calendar. And in some cities, I can go online to order a few steaks for that dinner with friends that slipped my mind and have them here and ready to cook in just a couple hours.
However, there is one thing that sometimes is sacrificed with these advancements: privacy. Data privacy rights are crucial to ensuring that your privacy isn’t violated no matter how connected our world becomes.
The most important thing with data privacy is knowing where you stand. The governments and legal structures of the world are, generally speaking, very supportive of individual rights and ensuring that no personal information that you don’t want to be released to the public is allowed on the world wide web.
The big thing that you need to know, however, is what these data privacy rights specifically are and how you can hold companies accountable to them. In this article, we’ll explore exactly that.
The Right to Be Informed
The right to be informed is your natural right to be informed any time that a company collects your personal information. If a website collects information about your location, browsing habits, demographics, and more, they have to inform you or they risk running afoul of international laws.
The Right to Erasure
If you so choose, you can mandate that any information that was collected by you by a company with prior consent is erased. They are legally not allowed to hold on to that data if you decide that you don’t want that data out there anymore.
The Right to Access
If your data was ever collected by a company, you have the right to access that data. You are allowed to know what was collected about you, who it was sent to, what the sources of that information were, and much more. Companies use software like Truyo to stay abreast of this regulation.
The Right to Damages
If the collection or release of misinformation about yourself led to personal damages, then you can file a suit and collect on those damages. No company is allowed to spread false information about you, so if one did so (intentionally or unintentionally) in a way that negatively impacted you, then you are entitled to compensation.
Protecting Your Data Privacy Rights
If at any time your data privacy rights are violated, you can protect your privacy by filing suit against the company. Talk to a lawyer that specializes in these kinds of cases before you file suit, however, so you can determine if you have a worthy cause. In addition, you can also reach out to the governing bodies of Internet privacy, such as the FTC, in order to report any privacy violations.