Data privacy and anonymization

Data ethics is the study and evaluation of moral challenges related to data collection and analysis.

Personally identifiable data (PID) is information that can be used to directly identify, contact, or locate an individual. Make sure you are aware of your organization's data security and privacy protocols. Data privacy refers to the proper handling of data. How you collect, process, analyze, share, archive, and delete data should be in accordance with the data privacy laws of the countries where your customers reside.

One important way to protect customer data is data anonymization. Data anonymization refers to one or more techniques to mask or remove personal information from data to protect the identities of people. Data anonymization is often performed on data coming from multiple sources. After the data has been anonymized, it can be more widely and freely shared in an organization. Types of data often anonymized are names, telephone numbers, email addresses, photographs, account numbers, and purchase transactions.

Data bias is a type of human error that skews results in a certain direction. This is possible if historical data was from an audience that wasn’t representative of all potential customers. If you create future ad campaigns based on previous customer behaviors, you could unknowingly perpetuate a bias.