POPI is the acronym for protection of personal information. It’s a South African data privacy law that’s established to protect individuals’ private details from being shared without their consent. Everyone has a right to keep their personal details private and in the process where individuals apply for jobs or even visit hospitals, people tend to share their personal information which could be shared with third parties without their consent. The POPI Act intends to regulate this process and prevent these details from being shared.
Who is the POPI Act Compliance for?
The POPI Act Compliance is not limited to individuals or businesses who are recruiting but should be accepted by all individuals and businesses who process personal information. Processing personal information here means requesting, storing, organising, or even retrieving individual data. These could be data that are processed electronically or physically.
Why Businesses needs to consider POPI Act Compliance
The POPI Act Compliance comes with a lot of benefits and we will discuss them shortly in this article.
Marketing
Most businesses out there use basic personal information for advertising as well as retargeting ads to reach potential clients who are most likely to patronize their products or services. If your company is compliant with the POPI Act, this will make your company more reliable and allow prospects to trust you with their details.
Increased level of trust – Improved reputation
One requirement of the POPI Act compliance is the security of data that is been collected and stored. Nowadays, hackers are continually trying to breach the security of small businesses and large corporations that process data. This has made a lot of individuals to be skeptical when it comes to giving their personal details out because it could lead to identity theft when there’s a successful data breach. With the POPI Act compliance, people believe that businesses must have passed a certain level of security assessment and there would have little or no room for security breaches as it comes with a lot of consequences. This will increase their level of trust in your business and enable them to share their personal information.
POPI Act compliance also provides businesses with the opportunity to notify regulators whenever there is a security breach in their system and how concerned individuals can protect themselves.
Your way forward to POPI Act Compliance
Your response to data breaches should be quick, effective and a detailed incident response plan is imperative to the severity of data breaches. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to constantly question what your business security protocols and programs are in place to deal with these attacks and data breaches.
IT Companies like ASG in Gauteng can assist your business with POPI compliance and has the necessary security and vulnerability assessments that can be performed on your IT infrastructure which will help you identify areas of vulnerabilities, and they will be able to suggest a solution to resolving these areas.
POPI compliance is due on the 30th June 2021 and if you still need to limit your businesses exposure, increase customer confidence and avoid data breach fines, you can read more about POPI Compliance solutions at ASG’s website.
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