By imposing severe limits on the amount and types of user data that companies could gather, regulations like the EU’s GDPR could actually benefit businesses by forcing them to focus on high-quality data while discarding the rest.
Here is an excerpt from an article in IT Pro:
In short, it might seem that GDPR prevents – or at least limits – companies in capturing data for analytics and doing anything that interesting with it. Yet there’s also a more positive way to look at the situation. In the past, many companies have had a tendency to collect every scrap of data they can, then repurpose that data or combine it with new data however they saw fit. This hasn’t always been a transparent process, and it hasn’t always led to a relationship of trust between organizations and their customers. What’s more, this hasn’t been a particularly effective way to store and process data, in some cases actually reducing its value. Perhaps most seriously, it’s made it easy for companies to lose control of that data and who has access, making it harder to safeguard.
Viewed from this perspective, GDPR becomes an opportunity to clean up, focus in on high-quality data and make it work better for the business. Instead of collecting everything and hoping to use it later, enterprises can look at their incoming data streams, capture what’s useful and discard what isn’t. This isn’t just good for analytics operations, but for data security as well. GDPR forces businesses to consider what they store and process and how it’s stored and processed and ensure that appropriate security measures are in place.
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… GDPR isn’t a horror or a hindrance, but a chance to clean house and redefine relationships. Minimizing the risks and handling the new obligations can go hand in hand with extracting more value from your data, while building trust between the enterprise and its customer.
