Can Privacy Be Big Business? A Wave of Startups Thinks So

[Aina]

California helped create the modern Big Data industry, in which tech companies vacuum up and profit off personal information. Now a new law in the state is creating something like a solution to the loss of privacy. From a report: The California Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect Jan. 1, gives people the right to know what large companies know about them and the right to block the sale of that information to others. In effect, it created a market for privacy expertise and software. A wave of privacy-focused technology startups is offering a variety of services, from personal data scrubbing to business-focused software meant to help companies comply with the law. A brief list of the nearly 300 companies now selling privacy services includes Privacera, Privsee, Privally, Privitar and Privaon. There’s DataFleets, DataGrail, DataGravity, Dataguise, DataTrue and Datastream.io. And there’s HITRUST, Mighty Trust, OneTrust, trust-hub, TrustArc and The Media Trust, as well as SecureB2B, Securiti.ai, Security Scorecard and Very Good Security. Personal privacy is still under threat from data breaches, data harvesting and elsewhere, but it may also finally be living up to its promise as a profitable business.