Essay Example on Protecting Intellectual Property and Customer Data: Strategies for Modern Businesses

Introduction

Data is crucial in current businesses. Therefore, sophisticated cybercriminals ARE always determined to steal customer data, and the data can be abused by employees (Gupta & Schneider, 2018). On the other hand, Intellectual property (IP) theft erases competitive advantage, and violations of privacy significantly undermine customer trust. Any original ideas, creative work, designs, inventions, and discoveries that are produced by a person or a group are covered by intellectual property (Toren, 2012). It is worth noting that in the past, there was not a big deal to protect IP. However, due to easier distribution and more accessibility of the information because of technology, protecting individuals or group's data from thieves, infringers and copycats have become essential to any business.

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Protection of Intellectual Property and Customer data

Registering patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

These are the three critical types of IP protection. It grants an individual or a group the right to his or her creations, specifically when it comes to commercial gains of its usage. Copyright involves protecting physical and intangible creative works (Toren, 2012). On the other hand, trademark involves the protection of logos, symbols, and designs from potential commercial saboteurs that could use or copy their designs for their economic gain. On the other hand, the patent carries legal protection, which excepts others from creating and distributing the creator's invention unless the content creator gives the individual license.

Registration of product, business and domain names

It significantly protects the interest and identity of the business, product, and domain names linked to the business. For example, Apple, a tech giant, did not own the domain name "apple.co.uk." until 2012 since the name belonged to an illustration company (Toren, 2012). Thus, Apple had to pay a considerable amount of money to the illustration company to acquire the domain name (Toren, 2012).

Avoid joint ownership

The creation and development of Intellectual property can be carried out by more than one individual in the case of an institution that has its research and development team. However, joint IP ownership gives control of patent, copyright, and trademark to more than one party (Toren, 2012). Thus it permits every individual owning the IP to recreate, copy, distribute, and wield anything they ought to do with the IP without consulting other owners. Hence it exposes the business to the risk of IP rights exploitation.

Security measures implementation

Implementation of strong security measures within the IT outline is vital to protecting the company against hacking and file corruption. Hence, the use of virtual private network access (VPN), data encryption, establishing Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), and setting up password protection for every computer network is essential (Toren, 2012).

Customer Data Protection

Current data protection approaches

Control access for the gathered data is the most common approach to protecting data used by many business. Establishing a regular schedule to be updated on the current encryption technology and practices is essential since encryption practices are often vulnerable to attack methods (Gupta & Schneider, 2018).

Synthetic data as protection

United States Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture, which collect data that is sensitive, are obligated by law to share the data publicly (Gupta & Schneider, 2018). Therefore, a method of changing original data to protected data is used by these agencies, which are then released. The approach enables sensitive variables to be protected in the original data through systematic perturbed methods.

Collecting what is necessary: The collection of the customer data that is not necessary provides a huge cache for cyber hackers to target.

Limit access to customer information: Not every individual in a company wants to see the personal information of the customer. When there few individuals are given the genuine need to access the information, it provides fewer opportunities for hackers to strike weak point methods (Gupta & Schneider, 2018).

Conclusion

Viewing a privacy ethics perspective has the potential of helping businesses establish and improve their code of conduct. Therefore, when privacy is considered from an ethics perspective and establishes a code of conduct, it makes everyone in agency security personnel accountable and protects valuable data.

References

Gupta, S., & Schneider, M. (2018). Protecting Customers' Privacy Requires More than Anonymizing Their Data. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 30 July 2020, from https://hbr.org/2018/06/protecting-customers-privacy-requires-more-than-anonymizing-their-data.

Toren, P. (2012). Protecting Intellectual Property: Best Practices. SearchSecurity. Retrieved 30 July 2020, from https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/opinion/Protecting-Intellectual-Property-Best-Practices.