Complying with the POPI Act is crucial to small business owners for one key reason.
If you don’t comply you face staggering fines and jail-time. In other words, compliance is important.
Protecting Personal Information is not a choice we can make for ourselves. It is a law we must follow
POPI is the SA version of Data Privacy Law already enacted across more than half the countries in the world. It’s rolling out fast. Australia goes live in January. Europe sees their GDPR enacted in May. (And their fines for non-compliance can reach €20 million, about 25x our highest fines.
Why all the fuss?
Data breaches are big news because they cause so much damage.
- If your bank exposes your credit card details you’re the person to face the fallout. Or if one of their suppliers loses your data. You take the pain, and they get away scot-free. That’s happened a few months ago in the USA when Equifax exposed 143 million records. The data includes social security numbers as well as full card details.
- Jigsaw Holdings in SA lost 63 million records in October 2017 that none of us knew existed, a mix of ID number, home addresses, employer details, income details, email addresses, …
- On October 24, 2017 a UK plastic surgeon exposed 10 TB of records of celebrity patients. This includes photos of them before, during and after surgery.
- More 900 big breaches in the first six months of 2017. More than 1.9 BILLION personal records exposed.I could go on but you get the picture.It’s tempting to think that this applies on to big businesses. But you’d be just as unhappy if the Guest Lodge you stayed at last week lost their photocopy of your credit card.
In other words, this new law will apply to all businesses. That makes sense.
The real problem we face is that the Act is complex. We don’t have the resources:
- To learn about it,
- To work out what needs doing,
- To find out how to do what needs to be done,
- And to actually do it.
Of course we can call in consultants. But they sell hours. It’s in their interests to sell as many hours as they can. But not in our interests.
This makes sense when consulting with massive firms. They have hundreds of workers using mainframes with complex software systems. Each of them has a unique set of systems. They have the funds and staff to action all the changes POPI demands.
You and I don’t.
To attend this training, which is online (which means you can go through it at a time that your business allows), join here: http://riveroflife.enterprises/popi
