Introduction

Welcome to Data Protection and Privacy Training one-o-one. The phrase "Data is the new gold" has been the buzz of the last decade. However, with such enormous amounts of data that organizations collect, comes the risk of data breaches. These breaches can expose or leak sensitive information about a person, such as their identity, geographical location, or health.

In this module you’ll learn about:

• The importance of data protection and privacy,
• Regulations concerning the usage and storage of data,
• And things to be aware of when handling customer or employee data in your organization.

Data protection and data privacy both fall under the category of data collection, handling, and storage. These are control mechanisms to ensure that data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. However, there are differences between these two terms that you should be aware of...

• Data privacy defines the policies and regulations according to which an entity, with whom the data is shared, uses the data.
• Whereas, data protection involves the use of tools and procedures to enforce the privacy policies and regulations and prevent unauthorized access or misuse of the data.

For example, a hospital has policies for collecting, handling, and storing patient data. Data privacy ensures that only the attending physicians have access to scans and medical history, but not the administrative staff or the finance team of the hospital.
On the other hand, through data protection, the IT team of the hospital ensures that the staff has access to only the data that they are authorized to. Data protection also tries to prevent the data from being hacked or corrupted.

In summary, while data protection focuses on protecting the data from unauthorized access or misuse, data privacy is about defining who has authorized access to the data.

In the next lesson, we will learn about the importance of data protection and data privacy.