As privacy issues move into public awareness, it’s important for consumers to understand what companies, governments, and other entities are doing with their private data. What really happens after you click “Submit”? How well-protected is your data? How do companies keep it safe — from unscrupulous data collectors, from overreaching governments, from malicious actors or just plain overly-curious employees? With Google as an example, take a look at the lifecycle of an average consumer’s PII, or personally identifiable information, from its entry into a website to its deletion from the site’s servers. Learn how private data is currently protected, and find out what you can do to safeguard your data and encourage more companies to implement strong data privacy protections.
Alisha Kloc is a security and privacy engineer at Google, where she protects users’ data from unauthorized access and misuse. Before Google she built security systems for several governments as a security engineer at Boeing. She is passionate about data security and user privacy, and believes that more openness around and sharing of corporate privacy policies, practices, and procedures will help companies and users develop a much stronger sense of, and appreciation for, data privacy and security.