Most enterprises are aware of the critical nature of personally identifiable information (PII) within their customer data. As a result, they take significant measures to protect it, such as encrypting databases holding PII, enforcing strong access controls, and logging every access. However, in today’s privacy and security-focused environment, the consequences of losing PII are severe, particularly due to stringent data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA. This is why event data should be a key consideration for data protection.
Unfortunately, PII often ends up in places beyond the production database, such as log files and event streams. These log files and event streams are frequently shared with third parties or stored in inadequately protected locations, exacerbating the security risk. For more information on best practices for tracking in-app event data, you can refer to our blog on the topic.
Data Protection Gone Wrong – A Case Study
A real-world example illustrates how even the smallest mistake can result in the accidental transmission of PII to third-party vendors, violating security policies and laws. In this case, an individual engineer inadvertently included PII in customer event data, which was then forwarded to third-party vendors. Tools like Segment can exacerbate such security issues due to their ease of forwarding event streams to multiple destinations.
RudderStack was developed to specifically address this problem.
How RudderStack Ensures Event Data Privacy and Protection
With RudderStack, you have complete control over your event data. The open-source, self-hosted Rudder data plane ensures that customer event data remains within your control. Additionally, Rudder’s transformation framework enables you to enforce policies, such as scrubbing sensitive data, before the event data is sent externally, thus preventing accidental leakages.
If you believe that data privacy and protection of your customers’ PII is a critical issue that can impact your business, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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