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As a business, clients generally expect that you are keeping their data secure and that they can trust you with their information.
Governments and regional unions as well are keeping an eye out for companies breaking PII data policies.
Data non-compliance distorts brand perception and attracts heavy penalties.
In 2018, 57 million Uber customers and driver accounts were exposed leading to a major settlement. Uber is set to pay $148,000,000 to take care of data breach cases across the US.
It’s safe to say that data privacy and compliance is, therefore, a matter of utmost concern in every industry.
With this increased pressure to toe the line, you may be wondering how to make your data collection and handling better and more secure.
Below, we’ll be discussing how AI analytics software, specifically Content Intelligence Cloud for Data Privacy, can help you improve your company’s PII data compliance strategies.
1. Secure PII Extraction
What is your company’s new client registration process like?
Banks, for example, rely on traditional means of data capture to extract personal information, which is linked to a new account.
An officer takes down information from personal documents handed in by the customer. He may then take pictures or scans of identification material, which he later on manually extracts to a database.
This information then passes across a chain of human workers or managers by hand. Along the way, there are risks of third-party data leakages and theft, either due to human error or negligence.
A study by Tessian and Stanford University laid it bare that human error causes 88% of data leakages.
AI analytics tools safeguard data privacy by shortening information flow.
For example, a bank salesman using OCR software can eliminate the paper trail of confidential information.
He can extract personally identifiable information directly from an image of a client’s ID, or from the document itself. Thus, the information transfers directly from the material into the sever, without cumbersome and risky manual data transfer processes in between.
As a manager, you can then access this information via a computer in a private and secure back office.
This elimination of manual data collection also alleviates the need for photocopies, which can be duplicated, and sometimes even outrightly stolen, by malicious “customers” waiting in line.
Additionally, it also enables the processing employee to get his tasks done faster and accurately.
2. Information Delivery Matching
You probably hear about it all the time, or maybe you’ve experienced it too.
You get an email about your medical information and history, only that the details are about someone else.
Recipient mix-ups put your clients at risk of many cybersecurity threats.
These online dangers include impersonation and phishing attacks, which, in the long run, can lead to financial harm.
For the company, on the other hand, delivery confusions may lead to costly court settlements as clients turn the heat on PII data compliance violations.
An investigative report by Verizon shows that the problem of recipient mix-ups is far a bigger issue than you would imagine. Of all the healthcare breaches that trace back to mistakes by employees, 63% of data breaches are because of mis delivery.
OCR software can ensure data entry accuracy to avoid mis delivery.
Using optical character recognition for data capture, medical staff can upload the correct data to the right patient slot.
The employee at the front desk quickly scans the documents and information is lifted from the images and documents. The details then feed into a new client profile that forms instantly from the generated data.
The result is a patient profile containing all the matching information. The patient’s address is in line with the name. Additionally, attached email accounts, phone numbers, and other information are perfectly accurate as well.
Now your email automation software sources information from an accurate database of client records that your workers have accurately, and easily, generated from OCR tools. Therefore, emails are sent to the correct recipients.
3. Regulated Information Retrieval
As a business, you’re probably aware that PII data compliance regulations restrict how much information you can obtain from your clients.
There are certain bits of information your company is allowed to take.
Additionally, depending on national and state limitations, some of that data is out-of-bounds.
PII data compliance laws mandate data collection within legal moderations.
Specifically, they commonly require that businesses should only take as much personally identifiable information as they need for each part of the service process.
Some of your employees, especially new staff, may not be aware of this. Or if they are, they often make mistakes and overreach the retrieval procedure. That’s where AI analytics technology saves the day by helping you enforce data security.
OCR software, through keyword restrictions, can automate regulated information retrieval.
So, for example, if you only require an identification number from a picture of an ID scan, OCR scanners with special algorithms only extract that number.
Therefore, the rest of the document, like in the image above, appears in blocked bars that conceal sensitive information that you don’t require.
Alternatively, the other data is simply left out altogether, and only the required value is automatically displayed in a data cell.
To enable this selective data capture, OCR scanners embedded with keyword priorities are required.
A rule-based machine translation algorithm enables special character recognition for this purpose. Other words or numbers that don’t meet recognition rules, in terms of format mainly, are ignored or blocked.
4. Eliminate Personal Devices
These days, employees play with the line between personal and professional, as they use their personal devices for work purposes.
Workers use their phones to take pictures of documents, and even to process the resulting files. It is a hot-desking strategy many companies are making popular with bring-your-own-devices strategies.
The problem though is that employees risk getting these devices misplaced, lost, or stolen, paving the way for breaches of PII data compliance and privacy.
Wharton School of Pennsylvania conducted a study that showed that 50% of mobile users don’t secure their devices with a PIN.
And the statistics get worse.
About 52% of workplace smartphones are lost to theft. In total and around the world, more than 70,000,000 phones face the same fate annually. 93% of these devices never turn up.
Workplace OCR software can reduce mobile device usage for document processing.
By incorporating OCR software into your workflow, you can encourage a more reliable and secure method of data entry and management. This directly impacts your ability to deliver great customer service because the data breach risk is mitigated beforehand.
Data obtained from work files only stay within the confines of a secure office database, and not on vulnerable devices that can be accessed by family, friends, and hackers.
Customer information hence is not suspectable to vulnerabilities, namely malware attacks & unauthorized access of everyday personal devices.
These OCR scanners can be built into the infrastructure of your corporate setup. Alternatively, they can be portable to enable mobile use around the office.
OCR readers serve as input devices and don’t store information in the reading mechanism, like how we use a keyboard on a desktop computer, but the data is stored on a hard disk elsewhere.
So even if the OCR reader were to be stolen or compromised in some way, uploaded client data would still be safe.
5. Data Availability Compliance
For many companies, transitioning from traditional paperwork data handling to digital methods, dark data is a huge problem. One that can lead to data compliance bodies knocking on your door.
You probably have huge stacks of non-searchable client information, or dark data, in the way of JPGs, TIFFs, and PDFs. Some of them contain sensitive data like billing information and social security numbers.
You’ll need to extract this information for encryption to better assure data privacy, and also to meet PII data compliance demands.
Manually sifting through files for PII is tiresome. What’s more, workers often miss important details here and there. There’s also the need to divert resources from everyday operations to get this task done.
OCR technology can improve data searchability for compliance purposes.
You can begin the process by first carrying out data mapping to identify dark data locations.
Then, you can set up an OCR solution to complement your current document management system and to automatically process the documents involved.
You can set aside a worker or two to implement the exercise using OCR technology.
Once all dark data has been incorporated into a digital, indexed, and text-searchable library, your employees can now easily look up key phrases of sensitive information for encryption.
Data encryption is another important requirement for many PII data compliance regulators around the world.
Some UK law firms are already using OCR to improve data searchability in a bid to meet GDPR data policies.
What data compliance and privacy issues are you facing?
Perhaps, OCR technology can help your company solve some of these problems.
You wouldn’t want to find yourself in the same boat as Rite Aid, which was crippled by a hefty $1 million fine and a 20-year penalty.
But you’re not only implementing data privacy solutions to stay out of hot water, but also to appease your customers and improve brand image.
An Entrust study shows that nearly 4 out of 5 consumers don’t believe their data is safe with global brands. That means most of your clients aren’t too sure if they can trust you.
You can change this narrative by implementing Adlib’s Content Intelligence Cloud for Data Privacy in your company.
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