Data privacy in the face of rapidly changing technology has become a hit button issue as the world's political and business leaders meet at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As more and more companies and businesses adapt their consumer strategies around expanding technologies and collecting data, consumer privacy has become a greater concern due to the lack of regulation in this new global frontier.
Technology has become very disruptive in the retail space as digital technology has dug its fingers into every part of the global economy. Speaking on the topic of digital transformation in an interview, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) CEO Keith Block said, "When I speak to other CEOs, we talk about the three pillars of digital transformation." Block defined these pillars as first tech refresh, second business model change, and third cultural impact of business.
Tech refresh as Block explained is the updating of technologies within an organization to maximize efficiency. This pillar of digital transformation has been adopted by many companies as the movement from on-site business to the cloud. This transformation than transitions the company to consider a business model change, with Block's example being that some business to business (B2B) sales companies are now shifting towards direct to consumer strategies due to the ease of business with new digital technology. The last pillar is simple; the cultural impact of the business has changed and will affect other businesses around it.
"These transformations will take some time. Everybody absorbs these technologies at a different pace," Block added.
A new survey by the global communications firm Edelman found that trust in tech has declined among consumers, falling from its once strongly held number one spot.
"For as long as we've been doing this survey, tech has been the number one industry," CEO Richard Edleman stated. "And now, you start to see a diminution of trust on the basis of concerns about the new forms of technology...[consumers are asking questions like] is my data actually my own and it is it safe?"
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella thinks that data privacy at an individual level needs to be thought more as a human right than a commodity, seeing that the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation as being a model the rest of the world should follow.
"In some senses, Europe has taken the lead with GDPR and has even effectively regulated that. In our case, we took that regulation and we are in fact hoping to see more of a federal standard in the United States and in the world over," Nadella stated in an interview.
Nadella believes that data privacy should be protected and companies moving forward with rapid technology need to be more transparent about their practices.
"Data that you [as a consumer] contribute to the world have utility for you, utility for the business that may be giving you a service in return--and the world at large...It's not just 'privacy' and 'oh, I give away my data.' I should be able to control in a much more finer-grained way how my data is used to create utility for me and the world and the causes I care about," Nadella stated when defining what he calls 'data dignity,' which is one step further than privacy that companies should take.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai's philosophy on data privacy is that tech giant's consumer products should be "privacy-enhancing," noting in a conference that Google has been increasingly giving users control and choice around the data the company has collected.
"Users come to Google at very important moments, ask us questions. We deal with people's sensitive information in Gmail, Google Photos, and so on. And so we have to earn that trust."