One comment (on this article) got me thinking:
I’m speaking to my business’s IT people about getting a “cold storage” option, even just a hard drive sitting in a desk drawer we update once a week. I don’t know how much I trust our cloud based database now.
Back when I was running Grand Union’s customer management function, I was fearful to the extent of paranoia about protecting our customers’ data privacy. So fearful was I that I made several changes (against massive resistance from IT) in our data storage process.
As with all such nascent programs of the time, when customers applied for a loyalty card, we collected their personal data (name and address) and applied a unique ID number embedded in the card’s magnetic strip (no chips back then). Like everyone else, we delegated this task to our card provider, who included that service, plus a direct mail service in their product offering. I wasn’t too comfortable about having our customers’ data in the hands of a third party, but you have to trust somebody sometimes, and I figured that they had more to lose in the mismanagement thereof, which would keep them honest.
Then I found out that our company’s IT department had ordered the provider to send them those customer files over to us, as a “backup” and “security” measure (of course). I didn’t like having two sets of data out there, but being the new boy, I kept my trap shut.
Then I found out that Store Operations was in the process of setting up a little routine which would track our staff’s spending — all staff had cards issued to them (for the wrong reasons, by the way, but I’ll talk about that some other time). So I blew up at the Ops VP — the first time I had exploded at a senior member of upper management, but by no means the last — and uttered the words that became quite legendary at Grand Union.
“Let me make one thing quite clear. Just because we are housing the data, does not mean you can play with it. You know who owns the data? I DO. And only I will dictate how the data is to be used from now on.” (There were more words, calling them idiots for abusing our own staff when in fact we were getting free research from their behavior, but that too is a story for another time.)
The result of all this was that I took all the personal customer data off the mainframe, leaving only the unique IDs behind, and stored that data not on our department’s terminal — which of course was linked to IT — but on a stand-alone PC in my techie Kenny’s office, on which resided only the customer data (and IDs of course), and the necessary tools to manage it (I used Paradox as the database manager and query tool, and Quattro Pro as the spreadsheet program). Incidentally, the only way I got funding for the PC was by threatening to just buy one with my own money if I got turned down. The only way to get data off that PC was by diskette (remember them) and Jaz cassettes (once again, the best mass offline storage media at the time); and I had the only other Jaz drive in the company (and also the only other Quattro Pro software, but that was by choice because MS Excel was and still is an inferior product).
And absolutely everything was password-protected — only Kenny and I had admin privileges. It was unwieldy, and often frustrating, and time-consuming; but our data was secure, which was all that mattered to me. So when we were doing a direct-mail promotion to our customer-cardholders, Kenny and I would do the analysis, then send the promotional offer and list of customer IDs to our card provider to create the mail shot. (The “sending” of the promo details involved handing a Jaz cassette to our account executive to take back to their IT department: also unwieldy and time-consuming, but irrelevant to me. And the head of their IT department was a great friend of mine, so I trusted him to safeguard the data.)
And all that was in the mid-1990s, when data snooping was rudimentary, crude and easily blocked. Now? Fuggedabahtit.
I do know that had anyone in my department even suggested to me that I back up our data on some Internet-based “cloud” (for the usual “convenience” reasons), I would probably have fired them, for forgetting that when it comes to data — most especially private data — security matters more than ease or convenience. I eve refused to back up our customer data on the company’s own mainframe, so protective did I feel about the issue.
And I think that people need to feel more like that today, because in today’s world data security is more, not less fragile and indeed vulnerable.
