If you’ve recently established a start-up or are thinking about creating one, it’s important that you understand why good privacy practice is essential for the success of your business.
Privacy is not about secrecy, it’s about transparency. It’s about letting your customers know exactly what personal information you’re collecting about them, how you’ll use it, and how you’ll keep it secure.
Building privacy into your products and services brings significant commercial and reputational benefits. An important one is customer trust. When people have confidence that you will respect and protect their personal information, they will use and trust your product or service. Privacy will distinguish you from competitors.
On the other hand, poor privacy practices can lead to serious loss of reputation and this can:
damage your customer relationships
jeopardise opportunities for funding
risk regulatory scrutiny and public sanctions for breaching Australia’s Privacy Act.
So if you want to be successful and grow or sell your business, you need to design your products or services with privacy in mind right from the beginning. Trying to bolt it in on later will be costly, and cause delays.
