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Doha, Qatar: Qatar is playing leading role in the field of protecting personal data privacy.
With increasing volumes of data being collected and processed, ensuring consumer data privacy becomes a constant challenge.
The Data Privacy Day marked every year on January 28 is an occasion to highlight the importance of protecting personal data for individuals and institutions. It serves as a crucial reminder to prioritise safeguarding personal information in today’s digital era and underscores the value of treating personal data with care.
Qatar is commitment to protect the privacy of personal data and is one of the first countries to issue a special law to protect the privacy of personal data. It was the first country in the Gulf and the third in the Arab world to enact this law from which it set out to build capacities and promote innovation, research and development in this field, to ensure the security of the country’s cyberspace.
Data Privacy Day was approved by the European Union (EU) to become a global day, corresponds to the signing of the Council of Europe Convention No.108, which is the most important convention on data protection, as it was agreed upon by a large group of countries in the world, under the best practices that govern the use of personal data in various technological means.
Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani issued Law No.13 of 2016 on the protection of personal data. The Law includes everything related to the protection of individual’s rights in regard to the privacy of personal data.
In alignment with Data Privacy Day, the National Cyber Security Agency, has disclosed a range of personal data privacy protection principles on its X platform. These encompass utilising of data solely for the intended purpose of collection, ensuring transparency throughout data processing, minimising the quantity of data subjected to processing, disposing data once processing is completed, implementing robust security measures to safeguard data integrity and avoiding prolonged data retention.
In an earlier post the National Cyber Security Agency advised to promptly update both personal and enterprise account passwords to strengthen security measures, emphasising the importance of regular password changes for heightened protection.
It also shared important tips to consider when updating password which include to enable two-factor authentication, use different passwords for each account, include a mix of numbers and symbols in passwords, choosing passwords that contain more than 12 characters and avoiding reusing previous passwords.
Dell Technologies 2023 Global Data Protection Index reveals increasing complexity of data protection and rising implications of IT downtime and security breaches. The costs associated with cyberattacks and related incidents have doubled, now topping $1.41m ($0.66m in 2022).
Over half (54%) oforganizations suffered a cyberattack or incident that prevented access to data last year, according to the 2023 Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index survey of 1,000 IT decision makers (ITDMs) and 500 IT security decision makers.
Generative AI (GenAI) is emerging as a strategic tool for bolstering defences, with 52% of those surveyed saying that integrating GenAI will provide an advantage to their organization’s cybersecurity posture.
