With more people working from home, business and personal lives are getting merged more than ever. This trend is also pushing the boundaries of what level of privacy can be expected by employees and consumers in this new work environment.
On the Small Business Radio Show this week, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, Raju Vegesna discusses how the employee needs to be in control of their own personal information that is shared by the company. He insists each individual must have the option to opt out of this process. For example, the employee should be aware of that a business does collect information about them that can be transferred to a third party usually to help that person with added services.
Interview with Raju Vegesna of Zoho
According to Raju, this often gets abused especially with collecting customer data; “the abuse unfortunately in today’s world is blatant” because there is so much money to be made. Charging customers on one side (for a service or product) and passing the information to others without them knowing is “in one word it’s greed”. He cites the example of “backend deals” like Mastercard passing information on consumer transactions to Google who is marketing ads.
Raju sees this getting even worse with facial recognition where companies can easily make a profile of a person and know a lot about their consumer habits. He adds that “the concept of freedom is being removed from the individual…but we should not give up the idea of privacy…I should decide what is shared”.
Unfortunately, Raju explains that most consumers do not understand their privacy rights and, in a rush to use the application, they just check the box to sign them away. He adds that “convenience gets in the way of privacy”. Raju insists that companies need to set the default to a private no sharing data mode. He emphasizes that “what is the point of being profitable when you are morally bankrupt?”
At Zoho, Raju says that they ensure the consumers’ privacy. He adds that “we don’t own the customers’ data, the customers do. We will never sell their data or let any surveillance companies track consumers on the Zoho platform. Customers pay us for the service and that’s it”.
Listen to the entire interview on employee privacy on the Small Business Radio Show.
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Image: Zoho
This article, "How Work from Home is Pushing the Boundaries of Privacy Again" was first published on Small Business Trends
July 27, 2020 at 08:00AM
via https//www.brucedayne.com/
Small Business Radio Show, Khareem Sudlow
