There is a global movement to identify and protect elements of private data. In 2018 the European Union launched their new Global Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), a rewrite of their 1990’s era policy. This is a high-water mark from a regulatory body that has identified the personal data definition and required safe handling of third parties of this data. Failure to properly maintain safeguards or delete records at the request of the data owner has stringent penalties. Other countries are adopting these standards or in the case of the USA some states are defining new personal data standards.
At the same time, we have witnessed an explosive growth and use of smartphones over the last 10 years. As edge devices, smartphones support voice, image, video, and smart wearable devices. This smartphone data growth has been increasing each year and has few privacy or information user protections. This edge captured data plus chat and messaging data has supported the explosive growth of the digital social media and merchant companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google and many more.
The data provenance of many of the company user enrollments is increasing coming into question. Adversarial uses of the edge platform and social media companies is hard to detect let alone control.
Privacy programs in use are mostly by industry regulation today. In healthcare, HIPAA/HiTech are used for patient identified data. In the financial sector, PCI (payment card industry) provides for user financial data to be protected.
The NeuStratos® methodology to collect the Edge data source and catalog the provenance of the data can assist in the identification that social media and merchant companies need to support their user data privacy path.