On Guard: Vendors of Data Companies Likely to Feel Compliance Pressure
This year guarantees to bring a surge in the use of data-security services. And some expect that companies that collect and manage a lot of data also will keep a watchful eye outside their own operations towards their vendor partners.
Acxiom’s Chief Privacy Officer Jennifer Barrett-Glasgow calls it “vendor credentialing,” and she anticipates the data-services firm will give more scrutiny to its vendor partners than ever before. Acxiom’s vendors, the better known of which include Google’s Doubleclick and TV data firm Rentrak, have access to select sets of data that flow through Acxiom’s system, some of which could be proprietary information owned by Acxiom clients and managed by the data firm, but passed along to those partners for ad targeting or other purposes.
“[Clients] want to make sure, ‘If we give our data to Acxiom, is it going to be safe?'” said Ms. Barrett-Glasgow. Along with applying its own data-security protection measures, she added, “We’re pushing all of that upstream to our vendors.”
