Online privacy will continue to grow as global technology companies embrace privacy protection efforts, while privacy-conscious ordinary consumers require transparency to know what data about them is collected and how it is used.

Further, defensive deletion of so-called data graveyards will reduce security risks, says business software multinational Zoho Corporation Africa regional manager Andrew Bourne.

"A survey Zoho conducted in early 2021 found that only 22% of South African businesses are aware of privacy laws governing their marketing activities, despite the Protection of Personal Information Act coming into effect on July 1.

"It also found that, while 76% of the businesses indicated that they have well-documented policies for customer data protection, only 57% are strictly applying those policies," he says.

Further, people want to know that companies are not going to collect data that consumers are not comfortable sharing and that the companies will be wholly transparent with the data they do collect.

"For the next few years, organisations that boldly come forward and declare their data collection practices with complete transparency and accountability will gain a competitive advantage," he notes.

Additionally, the better organisations get at safely disposing of data, the less risk they will face when it comes to cybersecurity breaches. With increasingly robust laws, companies will be forced to improve their governance but the organisations that fare best will be the ones that go above and beyond when it comes to data governance, he points out.

"Online privacy and security is an ongoing battle and organisations of all sizes will have to keep stepping up their efforts when it comes to protecting their customers and staff.

However, in many ways, 2021 was a landmark year for online privacy. In April 2021, [device manufacturer] Apple rolled out an update allowing users to opt out of app tracking, with most iPhone users having done so by the end of the year," Bourne illustrates.

However, there is clearly still a lot of work to be done, as, by the end of September 2021, there had been more data breaches than in the whole of 2020, impacting hundreds of millions of people. The average cost of a data breach rose to $4.24-million, the highest it has been in 17 years, he says.

Further, information and communications technology market research firm Gartner predicts that modern privacy laws will cover 75% of the world’s population by the end of 2023.

"The onus is on the organisations to set up a company-wide data governance framework that ensures only the minimum necessary amount of data is collected from customers along with their explicit consent and is further used, stored and managed responsibly.

"Equally important, organisations should ensure their business software providers and vendors also follow the same strict guidelines, policies and compliance procedures when it comes to data privacy," Bourne advises.