Balancing Innovation and Privacy: Data Privacy Challenges Facing Telecommunication Providers

Telecom providers collect, process, and share massive volumes of personal and sensitive data, making them prime targets for cyber threats. From the constant threat of falling victim to data breaches and cyberattacks to ensuring regulatory compliance (GDPR, PDPA, CCPA, etc.), telecom providers must always stay one step ahead by obtaining consent, ensuring data transparency, honoring data retention and deletion policies, and ensuring secure cross-border data transfers.

Although the telecom industry is subject to industry-specific laws, several data protection laws impose strict requirements on how telecom providers collect, store, process, and share customer data. These include GDPR (EU), CCPA/CPRA (California), and Malaysia’s PDPA.

To prevent data breaches, telecom providers must strengthen their data privacy and security measures, including implementing end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, adopting multi-factor authentication (MFA) for access control, conducting risk assessments, and onboarding AI-driven anomaly detection tools to identify suspicious activities.