It’s funny to me that marketers, as the keepers of perhaps the largest volume of customer data—from PII, purchase history, activity data, and more—are some of the most inconsistent practitioners of data security.
Sure – we make big, public efforts by shoring up our privacy policies for the latest regulations, adding SSL to our web pages, and using tools that suggest they practice safe security standards. These are good steps, and things are getting better.
But then we share unsecured spreadsheets loaded with PII over email internally, or worse, with third parties. Or we bend our policies, just this once, because there’s a unmissable opportunity, a strategic partnership, or an end-of-year push.
For marketers to be seen as trusted stewards of customers and the data we have on them – we’ve got to do more than pay lip service to security. It’s not just about establishing visible guardrails—it’s about determining what the map looks like—where we will and won’t go. Security has to be about more than talk and quick wins. We’ve got to do the hard stuff too.