Short answer: If your company accidentally discloses sensitive data, the consequences can be serious. Not just legal—such as GDPR fines—but also in terms of trust and your reputation. That’s why it’s essential to both prevent data exposure and respond appropriately if it happens.
Exposing sensitive data
When you expose sensitive data, the consequences can be disastrous, affecting everything from a person’s job to their relationships, to their health and home. Why so serious?
Sensitive data gets its very name from the fact that its exposure could cause harm. Whether the data is only viewed by a limited number of unauthorised persons or made totally public, it’s a big problem. Let’s talk about just what happens when you expose sensitive data.
What happens when you expose sensitive data?
Exposing sensitive data is not a mistake you can undo. Once exposed online, a person’s sensitive data can get compiled with other information about them that is publicly available. For example, on social media, search engines, and public databases. Here are some of the things that can happen when you expose sensitive data:
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Consequence #1: You violate people’s privacy. When you leak someone’s personal information, it violates their privacy and can even put them in danger. For example, if you leak someone’s social security number or mother’s maiden name they could easily become a victim of identity theft or fraud. Meanwhile, even leaking things as basic as a person’s name, email address, or phone number could put them at risk of unwanted marketing or worse, harassment and stalking.
- Consequence #2: Their money can be stolen. It goes without saying that exposing someone’s credit card information or banking details is unsafe. Financial information that goes online unprotected is an invitation for dishonest characters to use it to rob the person or make unauthorised transactions in their name.
- Consequence #3: They may suffer from profiling, discrimination, and unfair decision-making. Exposing sensitive information can make a person the target of negative stereotypes that block their access to education, employment, housing, healthcare, and more.
Let’s take a little more time to discuss this last point. If you’ve ever had to make a quick decision about a person you don’t know based on a small amount of information about them, congratulations! You profiled them. This happens on first dates, during job interviews, in courtrooms, and beyond. But what if negative information is needlessly thrown into the mix, out of context, and impacts an important decision about the person?
Did you know that data leaks that include personal data lead to customer loss and impact on business sustainability?
Ponemon Institute
Exposed sensitive data used for unfair profiling
Profiling essentially involves making assumptions about people or predicting their behavior based on their history or characteristics. Making very important decisions based on a limited amount of data about a person is standard practice for banks, insurance companies, landlords, employers, law enforcement, and more. These decisions can affect people’s livelihood, health, relationships, and other key factors to their happiness and well-being.
Certainly, profiling can be useful, legal, and fair in certain contexts. For example, an employer may ask to check someone’s criminal record, with their consent. On the other hand, imagine you accidentally expose personal data about someone else’s physical or mental health. Their future employer sees it. The employer could easily become biased against the person and give the position to someone else. The person becomes the victim of an unfair decision, all because you exposed their personal information. Here are a few other examples of unfair profiling that could happen if you expose someone’s personal data:
- Example 1: A family is house hunting and they finally find the perfect place. They fill in a rental application and submit it to the landlord. The landlord goes online and finds a negative performance review about the applicant that your company uploaded to the wrong place. He decides not to rent the place to them.
- Example 2: A birth mother has chosen someone as an adoptive parent for her unborn baby. Later, she finds information online that you accidentally leaked about their political beliefs several years ago and she changes her plans.
- Example 3: You run a tour company and a disgruntled employee steals customers’ travel data and puts it out on the public forum. Data he exposes about your customers includes when, where, and with whom they traveled. This affects their employment and relationships for a variety of reasons.
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How exposing sensitive data can damage a business
Aside from the harm you cause to others when you expose their personal data, a business can also suffer tremendously when it’s sensitive data is made public. Here’s how exposing sensitive data damages your business:
- Reputation: Your reputation will suffer. When you expose people’s sensitive data, you lose their trust. News of a data breach spreads quickly, resulting in negative publicity and public perception. Customers, clients, and partners may lose confidence in your ability to protect their data. This can directly affect your business opportunities and cause long-term damage to your brand.
- Legal charges: You might get a fine or face legal charges. Most countries have data protection laws in place that require organisations to take reasonable measures to safeguard sensitive information. If you cannot prove that you were doing everything you should protect data at the time of the leak, you could be hit with heavy legal actions, regulatory fines, and penalties.
- Interruption: It will interrupt your business. Dealing with the aftermath of a sensitive data exposure incident sucks up tons of time and resources. You’ll need to investigate the breach, contain it, notify affected individuals, implement remediation measures, and enhance security protocols. This means operational inefficiencies, productivity losses, and diversion of resources from core business activities.
- Competitiveness: You can lose your competitive advantage. Up until now, we’ve focused on the consequences of leaking other people’s data. But a data leak may also expose your company’s sensitive business information. For example, intellectual property, trade secrets, and proprietary algorithms. This type of confidential information is a key part of your competitive advantage. Its theft or exposure can undermine your company’s ability to innovate, maintain market advantage, and generate revenue.
In short, sensitive data exposure can have severe consequences for your business, directly affecting your finances, reputation, legal compliance, and operational stability. The longer the problem goes on the worse it will be and the more liability for your company. That’s why it’s so important to discover weak points in your security before they cause problems.
FAQ on personal data exposure
1. Do we always have to report if sensitive data is exposed?
Only if it poses a risk to the rights and freedoms of the individual – this must be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
2. Do we have to inform the individuals affected?
Yes, if the risk is high. It’s a matter of transparency and accountability.
3. What is most important to document?
The time of the exposure, what happened, who was affected, and what actions you took to respond and prevent it from happening again.
Stop the GDPR monster before it gets its hold of your personal data
How to avoid exposing sensitive data – the easy way
To prevent accidental sharing of sensitive data and strengthen your compliance, start by gaining visibility. Map out which sensitive data you store, where it’s located – and who has access. This includes both personal data and confidential business documents. For a simple and effective approach, a GDPR Risk Assessment can help you identify and protect sensitive data across files, systems and users – before it becomes a problem.
Learn more
Sebastian Allerelli
Founder & COO at Safe Online
Sebastian is the co-founder and COO of Safe Online, where he focuses on automating processes and developing innovative solutions within data protection and compliance. With a background from Copenhagen Business Academy and experience within identity and access management, he has a keen understanding of GDPR and data security. As a writer on Safe Online's Knowledge Hub, Sebastian shares his expertise through practical advice and in-depth analysis that help companies navigate the complex GDPR landscape. His posts combine technical insight with business understanding and provide concrete solutions for effective compliance.
