[REPOST] Years ago, I was the CTO of a software company that was perhaps the worst run company I’ve ever seen. It was run by a “chairman” who used to be a flight engineer, and who had no experience at all in the software industry. One day, in his expansive wisdom, Mr. Chairman decided that we were going to give his friend (a local pastor) an office. I was ordered by Mr. Chairman to make it impossible for anybody (“Even you!!!”) to access any of Mr. Pastor’s files (because, y’know, privacy and stuff). I attempted to point out a couple of problems with that scenario, but was immediately shut down and ordered to do what I was told.
Now, this particular person had… well, let’s call it a quirk. When anything went wrong with his computer, his solution was to format his C: drive. (Yeah, I know…) The inevitable happened, and Mr. Chairman ordered me to restore all of Mr. Pastor’s files from the backup (which we normally did… ahem… religiously). I looked at him innocently and said “What backup?” It took possibly five seconds for steam to begin pouring from his ears, and for him to start screaming, “YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T DO A BACKUP??? WHY YOU…!!!” and so on. I waited for him to finish, and then asked him politely how he proposed that I do a backup of files that I’m not allowed to have any access to? The silence that followed was glorious.
I worked as a Data Engineer in health insurance for almost a decade. I’m Canadian, but we have similar laws and the answer is basically that every employee signs a lot of NDAs. Data access should be limited to what you need to do your role, and any data that leaves the company has to be totally stripped of personal identifying information (usually some form of data masking).
That being said, I never found it difficult to get access to data, it was usually just another NDA to sign. I did work with government policies for a bit where I had to go to a government facility and get finger printed and all that before they gave me access, that was interesting. I work in tech now and the controls around data access are a lot more serious, gotta jump through a lot of hoops to get access to anything. Probably because of the scrutiny tech is under these days.
What if you need personal info? Or will you never need it?
Personal info is fine to use if you’re using it internally for uses that clients agreed to in the ToS and you’ve signed the appropriate NDAs. If personal data is being sent externally the clients have to agree to the external personal data use, or it has to be masked/aggregated so that it no longer contains personal data.