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Just over a week away from Privacy Awareness Week, the importance of transparency with individuals is a key theme in this week’s Asia-Pacific Digest.

Mandatory retention laws have been in place for less than a month, and the first data breach has been reported. It should be comforting that law enforcement agencies face the same challenges as commercial organizations in educating staff about the obligations and risks with respect to handling information. If your information was breached, would “human error” be an acceptable response for you?

In India, Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system, raises privacy concerns again. The risk of harm to an individual becomes permanent — an individual cannot be provided with a new fingerprint or new face. However, when a credit card is stolen or social media accounts are hacked, the harm to an individual can be alleviated by canceling credit cards or changing passwords. Although Aadhaar is aimed to assist those in society who are not comfortable using chips and PINs with cards by moving toward a biometric cashless transactional ecosystem, the debate intensifies as to whether this convenience really causes individuals to disregard privacy. Given the sensitivity of biometric information, a further question regards the security of the information while being used as an authentication mechanism via point-of-sale (POS) machines as they are an easy target for hacks. The absence of strong privacy and data protection laws demonstrates the challenges of transparency with individuals when privacy by design principles are seen as an afterthought to innovation.

If privacy is indeed becoming an afterthought to innovation, does this mean consumers will be paying a premium for data privacy? It seems consumers are happy to provide details for a financial incentive — is it a fair exchange, though? Consumers may not always allow organizations to offer incentives and may choose not to hand over data for a service. The question is: Will this come at a price?

One thing is certain, though: Organizations are faced with a tough choice of paying a ransom to save commercial property or not submit to black hats. Netflix has shown the world just this. Having refused to pay a ransom, full episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” have become available online. In this arms race of good guys versus the bad guys, it is encouraging to see organizations are pushing back and not funding the continuation of malicious attacks while protecting their brand.

The arms race between our own hearts and minds is perplexing as our privacy concerns may not necessarily be reflected in our behaviors. Organizations need to realize that the trust of consumers is critical as their loyalty can be undermined quickly if information is used not in line with consumer behaviors.

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