Tag: Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)

The Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG) has published a new blog on Open Finance, noting that South African regulatory authorities have started looking at open finance as it relates to their respective mandates.

The pandemic has put a significant strain on all industry sectors none more so than in healthcare where there was a need to adopt more data-driven planning and decision-making at lightning speed. At a time when expanding remote care, telemedicine, and m-health initiatives have become the order of the day, the spotlight has turned to the safeguarding of sensitive information at a scale comparable to the financial services sector.

The cloud infrastructure market is likely to be the battleground of the immediate future. Globally, the cloud is booming with the combined public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) segments forecast to have revenues of $400 billion in 2025.

Although South Africa faced the peak of its 'Fourth COVID-19 Wave' at the end of 2021, news reports show that the country is firmly heading back to business as usual. Mid-January a Daily Maverick report quoted the health minister, as he confirmed that Gauteng has officially exited the fourth wave, while the rest of the provinces have reached their peak and are now on ‘steady decline’.

In a move to charter a 'course towards a more privacy-first web', Google announced plans to phase out third-party cookies in their Chrome browser by mid-2023. This comes as part of their broader Privacy Sandbox initiative launched in 2019 and has led businesses to speculate about the future of digital advertising.

As South Africa battles a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections, all eyes are on how businesses will steady the ship and continue to prepare themselves for future shocks and disruptions. This, coupled with a global surge in cyber attacks, means that digital transformation and acceleration remain as relevant and important, if not more so than ever. 

In many ways, 2021 was a landmark year for online privacy. In April 2021, Apple rolled out an update allowing users to opt out of app tracking, with most iPhone users having done so by the end of the year. There were even talks to disable tracking technology on the world’s most popular web browser.

The world of digital marketing is in a state of upheaval. With everyone from government policymakers to independent web browsers changing and updating privacy policies, businesses are faced with a digital advertising minefield.

Innovation cycles are a key catalyst for growth and play a critical role in both entrepreneurship and economic development. The term ‘creative destruction’ was first coined in 1942 by economist Joseph Schumpeter. It refers to the dismantling of traditional business and economic models to pave the way for revolutionary technologies and innovative processes to improve the way things are done.

Storing data securely and using it appropriately should not be merely a compliance-driven practice; it should be a cornerstone of any business. Not only does appropriate data protection and use protect your business from risk, but it is also key to building customer trust, without which, no business can survive for any reasonable length of time.