Enterprise Use Cases for External Data Privacy: Part II

Welcome to the second part of our Enterprise Use Cases for External Data Privacy article series. In part one, we discussed the importance of External Data Privacy (EDP) and explored two potent EDP use cases: data breach defense and poach defense.

In part one, we also discussed the costs of ignoring exposed employee personally identifiable information (PII). These include:

• Employee churn (aka Employee turnover)
• Higher risk of data breaches and other cyberattacks
• Higher risk of attacks on partners and vendors
• Loss of stakeholder confidence
• Loss of customer and employee trust
• Poor brand image
• Productivity loss

Part two of this article series discusses two additional use cases for EDP: vendor risk management (VRM) and employee productivity.

A Quick Overview of EDP and Privacy Bee

No modern cybersecurity solution exists that addresses the problem of exposed employee PII, creating a significant gap in security. A crucial business need is a platform capable of scanning for exposed PII, removing it, and monitoring for future exposures.

Privacy Bee’s advanced EDP privacy platform can scan, remove, and monitor exposed employee PII across the internet and dark web. This comprehensive process includes over 350 of the world’s most notorious Data Brokers and People Search Sites.

In addition, we work with more than 117,000 organizations to enforce our users’ privacy choices. Members can easily set their privacy preferences using their customized Privacy Dashboard and zero-trust browser extension. After setting these preferences, Privacy Bee reaches out to untrusted organizations to delete any data they have on the user.

Learn about the Privacy Bee platform and how it can de-risk your organization.

Use Case #1 Vendor Risk Management

Enterprises rely on third-party vendors and other partners today more than ever to supplement and complement their operations. Vendors can bring numerous enterprise benefits, including enhanced productivity and cost savings. However, vendors also carry risks, especially when it comes to External Data Privacy.

Business Problem

Most enterprises share sensitive information with vendors, which poses inherent privacy risks. While valuable, traditional vendor risk management (VRM) solutions tend to limit their focus to internal data security measures such as encryption, access control, and user authentication. In short, VRM overlooks the problem of exposed external data.

This omission creates a major vulnerability, as exposed employee PII is a leading attack vector for cybercriminals and a significant security risk for organizations. The result is an increased risk of data breaches and other security incidents.

Proposed Solution

Privacy Bee VRM is an application that addresses this vulnerability by monitoring vendor EDP risk and removing employee exposures.

The VRM application integrates into the Privacy Bee’s EDP platform. The first step prompts users to select their vendor partners. After inputting this information, the platform begins monitoring each vendor’s PII exposure immediately.

Following a quick scan, Privacy Bee VRM calculates a Privacy Risk Score (PRS) for each vendor, providing a simple and easy-to-understand metric for evaluating their EDP risk.

Privacy Bee then works with the vendors on users’ behalf to strengthen their privacy practices which, in turn, de-risks the user’s enterprise by giving them a more secure supply chain.

Critically, Privacy Bee VRM monitors for changes to vendor EDP status 24/7/365. In this way, the enterprise can see which vendors are strengthening their EDP posture and which are trending the wrong way. These data provide the user with all the data needed to make the right vendor decisions for their business.

Benefits

Privacy Bee VRM provides detailed, micro-level insights into each vendor’s EDP risks through a rich analytics-driven privacy dashboard. Privacy Bee also works with vendors to reduce their EDP risk by decreasing their vulnerabilities and, in turn, improving both organizations’ security posture.

Other risk-mitigating features of Privacy Bee VRM include:

• A list of curated vendors by Privacy Bee’s VRM experts
• Alerts notifying changes to vendor risk stature
• Department-level risk assessments
• Identification of the most at-risk vendors
• Mandatory Privacy Risk Assessments (PRAs)
• Minimum vendor EDP score thresholds
• Real-time monitoring of changes to vendor risk.

In addition to improving their security posture, Privacy Bee VRM helps organizations stay compliant under specific laws such as the CCPA, VCDPA, and GRCC. As data privacy laws are likely to become stricter in the near future, Privacy Bee CRM is an excellent way to stay ahead of the curve.

Use Case #2: Employee Productivity

Employers lose an exorbitant amount of money due to preventable distractions. “Involuntary” distractions, those not within the employee’s control, are much more prevalent due to the proliferation of PII.

Business Problem

The amount of freely available PII is astounding. In 2022, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) estimates that over 422 million people were affected by data breaches.

Employers, knowingly or unknowingly, suffer from productivity issues resulting from this proliferation of exposed PII. Telemarketing calls, spam messages, recruiter harassment, and other unwanted communications needlessly distract your employees from the work at hand.

Studies from respected organizations such as the Ponemon Institute and Stanford University have repeatedly confirmed the considerable productivity losses resulting from PII-enabled distractions. Even a “minor” disturbance, such as a spam message or unwanted recruiter call or email, may reduce employee productivity by over 30%.

Proposed Solution

An External Data Privacy platform that removes employee PII is an effective countermeasure to the abovementioned productivity problems. Privacy Bee’s EDP platform for businesses reduces the employee info that spammers, telemarketers, recruiters, and others use to contact employees.

The information removed by Privacy Bee includes (but is not limited to):

• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Employer name
• Job title
• Home address
• Social media details

Privacy Bee offers users several privacy tools which give the user back control. These include:

• A proprietary company database of over 117,000 companies from which the user can set their privacy settings
• A zero-trust browser extension gives the user complete control over what data to share
• Marketing list opt-outs to reduce telemarketing, spam messages, and more

Benefits

The result of this suite of privacy solutions is less publically available PII with which to disturb the employee and untapped productivity for the employer. More than 85% of employees report being dissatisfied with their privacy in the workplace. An EDP solution that limits the amount of contact information available to scammers, marketers, and recruiters can reduce this number substantially.

Productivity-wise, most reputable sources typically cite a 10 to 20% increase in productivity due to good employer data privacy practices.

Take the first steps toward a more private organization by scanning employees for PII exposure.