Your data privacy and elearning

In the 2018-2019 Survey of Canadians on Privacy conducted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, just over half of Canadians rated their knowledge of how to protect their privacy rights as good (46%) or very good (11%) and nearly half (48%) feel confident that they know enough information about how new technologies might affect their personal privacy.

However, the vast majority (90%) are at least somewhat concerned about people using their online information to attempt to steal their identity, about companies or organizations using this information to make decisions about them (88%), and about social media platforms gathering their personal information to create detailed profiles about them (87%).

Most Canadians feel they have little to no control over how their personal information is being used by companies (67%) or by government (61%). Not surprisingly, the large majority of Canadians (86%) disagreed that companies should be able to share their personal information for purposes other than to provide them services.

The majority of Canadians have refused to provide an organization or business with their personal information (76%), and more than eight in 10 (84%) Canadians said that news reports about privacy breaches have affected how willing they are to share personal information. These statistics are virtually unchanged from 2016.

Given these concerns, it is not surprising that 3 out of 4 Canadians who use a mobile device have taken measures to protect their personal information, either by adjusting settings to limit personal information that is shared on their mobile device, and/or refusing to install or uninstalling apps because they were concerned about the personal information they were being asked to provide.

Now that you know how concerned the average Canadian is about their personal information, you should consider how much information your company really requires your learners to provide when providing online learning. You can’t leak what you don’t have, and minimizing the amount of personally identifiable details your company collects about your learners will give your learners more confidence to engage in your online learning tools, and reduce the risk to your learners in the event of a security breach.

If your elearning is being hosted on a cloud system, consider looking for security features such as built in data encryption, automatic antivirus scanning, anti-spam features, and IP blockers to protect both your learners’ personal information as well as your company’s content.

Don’t forget that your users can be the weakest part of your security system, so make sure your learners are up to date on your security policies regarding password use, phishing emails, accessing your elearning through personal devices, and other best practices.

Pathways is working on multiple elearning projects to help our clients ensure that their employees are informed of their information policies and practices to protect their customer and employee data.