Hello! I’m Mark Horseman, and welcome to The Cool Kids Corner. This is my monthly check-in to share with you the people and ideas I encounter as a data evangelist with DATAVERSITY. This month, we’re talking about personal identifiable information (PII) and the privacy of that data, but also about ways organizations use personal data to provide better, more personal service to customers. Specifically, we’ll be looking at data as it relates to equity and inclusion for under-represented groups. When new zealand whatsapp number data does our desire to do good in an ethical way run up against the expectation of privacy, which ultimately must be respected? We’ll dive into some examples of how this becomes a grey area and ultimately, we’ll see what the cool kids are saying.
Early in my career, I was tasked with managing the security and organizational definition of self-identified indigenous students at a higher-education institution in Canada. We encouraged students to self-identify so that we could do analysis on retention rates and other “student success” metrics. This wasn’t my first go around with privacy and security at this time, thankfully, but I quickly had the epiphany (as well as learning from the wisdom of our Institutional Analysis team) that with a much smaller population, identifying a small number of students in a program became a privacy risk. While our goals were to improve the student experience for an under-represented population at the university, we had to be careful we weren’t identifying individual students who might have been struggling in a program.