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Have you ever refused to hand over data because you weren’t sure how to limit access appropriately?

Or have you just given complete access to your database because you didn’t know how else to share the information?

Risks Associated with Oversharing Your Business & Customer data

Oversharing your business and customer data often happens as an unintended consequence of trying to do the right thing. However, it can significantly increase the risk of breaching data protection regulations, leading to fines, reputation damage and loss of trust in your business. This guide will help you be aware of the key risk of oversharing and how you address them.

Being aware of the risks means you can develop methods to eliminate or control what happens and offer increased privacy and security regarding information sharing.

The chances are as follows,

  • Increased risk of data breach and of a higher magnitude.
  • Non-compliance with regulations and data privacy laws.
  • Digital data to be reshared over and over with no restrictions being applied.
  • Being unable to dispose of all the copies of the data once they’re no longer required.
  • Inability to determine the course of the leak.

What Does Sharing The Right Data Entail?

Sharing data is essential for developing, designing, and providing services; you cannot efficiently run your business without sharing data. However, oversharing data can be a real cause for businesses and open you up to the very real risk of data breaches. However,

Businesses can be liable for breaches of GDPR if they’re not found to be controlling access to their information and increasing security. The fines for data breaches can be vast, and the loss of reputation is hard to recover from.

You need a way to protect sensitive information and separate what is required to run aspects of your business and what needs to be protected for safety and security. Limiting the type of data and the amount you share can afford your business and your clients increased benefits, privacy and security.

How can this be applied in businesses? Let’s break this down into three common scenarios where oversharing can occur.

Scenario: Software Development

Take an eCommerce store with custom software. To ensure the software is doing what it needs to do, the software development team needs access to data to help them develop new features. But often, this can lead to dev teams having access to sensitive data on production databases that they don’t need or shouldn’t have access to. This can include customer private data and their shopping history, stock listings and prices, organisation sales data and more.

Providing full access to your data can lead to increased risks for the business and customers. Instead, you should limit access to data that isn’t required, by providing artificial prices, shopping history and customer data. This means you can still allow the dev teams the information they need but control the visibility of any data surplus to requirements.

Scenario: Research

Let’s look at medical data used for research purposes. By giving researchers access to sensitive details and allowing them full access to databases, not only will you be going against regulations, but you are increasing the risk of a data breach by allowing too many parties to access patient details. The scope of information needed for research is usually significantly smaller.

More effective data-sharing methods in these instances include creating a sub-samples per each research that include only relevant data as well as removing any personal details of patience or any other unique identifiers. Sharing correct information allows for work to be carried out without putting patient details at risk. If done right, the data shared with the research team can also be reshaped to the form most convenient for researchers.

Scenario: Sales Analytics

Allowing analysts access to the entire database instead of the specific sales data they need means they can access historical sales, private customer data, price lists and more. This information falling into the wrong hands can be disastrous for the organization and open them up to risks of data breaches, fraud and legal proceedings from customers and suppliers who have had their sensitive data shared.

Introducing the data necessary for the analyst specifically for the task at hand can remove the need for total database sharing to happen, thus improving safety and security. The organization needs to be able to segment data to remove any sensitive details and identify aspects of the data that need and don’t need to be shared. Limits for time periods can be introduced so that analysts only access specific data from requested time frames, while the data analyst receives can be reshaped to make it easier for reporting.

About Us

Przemek Switalski

Chief of Customer Success

Przemek is responsible for the product design and client implementations, making sure everyone is happy and that we deliver as expected or above expectations.

Adam Switalski

Chief Technology Officer

Adam is responsible for our engine design and implementation. He’s making sure we handle large volumes of data staying low on resources.

Sharing data is always linked with risk, let’s have a chat and see how we can contribute to the safety of your organization.