Lawsuits and claims related to biometric information processing and cyber-physical systems will reach $8 billion in fines and settlements by 2025 as privacy budgets are also expected to grow significantly, according to IT research firm Gartner.
AI-enabled technologies, smart buildings, smart cities and other cyber-physical systems that capture biometric information are growing, but that information has a huge potential to be misused or abused, Gartner says.
Privacy budgets at large organizations increased from $1.7 million in 2019 to $2 million in 2021, and are expected to increase at a steady rate, exceeding $2.5 million by 2024. That will allow for a shift from compliance ethics to competitive differentiation, the firm says.
Bart Willemsen, research vice president at Gartner, said at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit taking place virtually in the Middle East today that new privacy laws cover the capture, conversion, storage and processing of biometric data and can even apply to face tagging in social media.
Those laws may also prohibit selling, leasing, trading or profiting from that data, while some laws prohibit the use of biometric information altogether for some use cases.
“In such cases, it is important that security and risk management leaders and privacy leaders consider alternative, less invasive means to achieve the intended purposes, explaining all necessary information to the customer without any caveat,” Willemsen said in a statement.
Cybersecurity and privacy have been hot-button issues over the last two years thanks to the pandemic, remote working, online learning and the uptick in online activity.
Gartner recommends that organizations that haven’t started working on their privacy program start now via privacy rights and consent management services.
“The customer will experience the difference between having to wait weeks for an incomplete answer, or within seconds have full access to the answer to the question ‘what data does an organization process on me?’ That difference is where trust is gained, or lost,” said Willemsen.
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