Parking payment technology has advanced from the spare change in your wallet to an app on your phone hosted in the cloud. Digital parking apps and services provide ease and convenience to both parties to a digital parking transaction. However, while feeding quarters in a parking meter is a rather anonymous transaction, the use of a digital platform for a parking transaction requires a user to provide, and a company to store, personal and financial information of its users. This creates a duty for parking technology providers to properly secure and safeguard highly-valuable, protected personally identifiable information.
In the digital realm, protected personally identifiable information (PII) includes names, license plate numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle nicknames, passwords, and home addresses. Hackers and digital scammers spend a lot of time and effort attempting to infiltrate digital platforms to steal PII for criminal enterprise, resulting in billions of dollars of losses due to identity theft and fraud. The failure to properly secure customer PII can create liability to a digital service provider for reckless or negligent disclosure.
Michael J. Ash, Esq., CRE, partner with Carlin & Ward, shares the potential pitfalls and liabilities of personally identifiable data and some great tips for avoiding them, in this month’s Parking & Mobility magazine. Click here to read the whole article.