Most privacy laws around the world provide for a right of access to one’s personal information. We’ve had that component in our public and private sector laws for quite some time. In the United States, it is a newer idea, and I know that organizations subject to, for example, the new California Consumer Privacy Act are scrambling to deal with access requests.

One industry in Canada that has experience dealing with access requests is the telecommunications industry. The vast majority of these requests gets processed in the normal course of business with little disruption. Of course, there are the outliers in which lawyers need to get involved, costs go up and things get more complicated.

This past week, as a customer of Rogers, I had the option of phoning or using a web chat function to make changes to my cable and internet plan. I chose the web chat function, and the conversation was relatively painless (albeit a bit too long). The best part, however, came at the end when I clicked to close the chat session. I was immediately prompted with the question as to whether I wanted a transcript of the chat session automatically emailed to me. I thought that this was an excellent way of dealing with the right of access in a pro-privacy way.

I know from experience that dealing with the transcripts of calls and other customer interactions makes up a big part of what organizations must deal with when people exercise their right of access. By being proactive and pro-privacy in this regard, this one company is surely managing to reduce their access workload. A good example of privacy by design, if you ask me.

I often use this space to point out what’s not working well or how something is going wrong. With this positive experience having just played out for me, I thought I’d call out a good news story this week. See? Doing privacy right really is good for business.