Online Translation Tools and Data Breaches

Is Your Team Violating Data Compliance Laws?

Data leakage and lack of information are two critical issues that can harm businesses. Nonetheless, due to the ever-growing global marketing and communication needs, the temptation to use the fast and free online translation tools are rising.

Apart from the apparent dangers that these tools pose to businesses such as miscommunication, loss of business, and cultural insults, there is critical important threat that many enterprises often fail to recognize. 

Whenever an employee uses a free online translation tool, they may cause massive data privacy breaches by making the consumer data searchable. Data breaches as such mainly happen due to employee negligence looking for quick machine translation, and it can often put millions of customers’ sensitive data at exposed on the internet.

Companies thus struggle to find the right balance between enabling business and securing information. Without the capability of translating software, potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of employees could turn to free translation tools to get their content translated in turn making the content available online.

European GDPR

Since the new European Union law in existence with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies have been receiving heavy fines when found guilty of data breaches.

GDPR provides citizens with the right to ask businesses to keep their information secure. This means that they have some kind of authority to prevent criminals from stealing any kind of personal information.

When organizations use online translation tools to translate customer information, they are literally serving the information to criminals in a silver platter. Thus, whenever using an online translator, organizations have to be wary about the type of information being disclosed and whether they are in compliance with GDPR or not.

Learn if your team is violating the data compliance law with online translation tools.

Generally speaking, even professional human translators require the distribution of source content across translators and editors in order to perform specific tasks. Basically, there are two ways in which confidential information is leaked.

First, the information is stolen ‘in transit’. This means, when data is transferred over unsecured servers such as public Wi-Fi hotspot or cloud servers, there occurs data leaks which are clear indications of lax oversight.

Secondly, data can be leaked when using online machine translation tools as mentioned earlier. The data translated online can be found by anyone who conducts an Internet search.

To sum up, completely discarding the use of Machine Translation tools is never the only option to overcome data breach issues. The solution is to use an on-premise NMT to secure the information that is being translated and to mask the sensitive data with tool like the Anonymizer^TM.

With secure and Ai-powered tools like these, your company not only avoids any traces in the open internet, but you will also save money and help build assets for reuse. Furthermore, the Anonymizer^TM mechanism works in compliance with GDPR and aids your data stay secure within the corporate network. *

It’s time you start using it to avoid data leaks, and more importantly to stay away from heavy GDPR fines.

*Anonymization cannot guarantee GDPR compliance. However, this technique can help lessen the risk of violations before personal data needs to be transferred outside of the European Union.