Everyone that has kids—or ever was a kid—knows that the best way to avoid trouble is not to put yourself in a position where trouble is likely to find you in the first place. In the privacy realm, this means taking steps at the outset to minimize risk of exposure and mitigate the potential consequences of a breach or other inadvertent disclosure. The recently discovered database breach at Epsilon demonstrates how vulnerable personally identifiable information can be to unauthorized access and theft. For a third party vendor such as Epsilon, the consequences of these types of exposures are particularly wide reaching—potentially extending across an entire client base—exposing multiple brands not just to security concerns but to customer discontent. In the last couple of days, companies including Target, Kroger, TiVo, US Bank, Home Shopping Network, Ameriprise Financial, LL Bean, Visa Card, Brookstone, Walgreens, Disney Destinations, and Best Buy have notified their own customers about the breach.
According to the Aberdeen Group, every eCommerce Manager in the land would gladly take a 7% increase in conversion, an 11% increase in page views and a 16% increase in Customer Satisfaction.* These are metrics that online retailers already spend much time and effort optimising. So imagine how frustrating it can be when a whole team and its efforts are derailed by literally 1 second of additional page load time. That one second can completely reverse the desired metrics above.