rectification
What It Means
Rectification is a customer's legal right to request that your company fix or update incorrect personal information you have about them. When someone says their data is wrong in your systems, you're legally obligated to investigate and correct it if they're right. This applies to everything from misspelled names to outdated job titles to incorrect preferences in your AI training datasets.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
AI models trained on incorrect personal data will produce flawed outputs and recommendations, potentially leading to discriminatory or harmful decisions. When customers exercise rectification rights, you must not only fix your databases but also retrain or adjust AI models that learned from the bad data. Failing to handle these requests properly exposes you to regulatory fines under GDPR, state privacy laws, and reputational damage from AI systems that make decisions based on outdated information.
Real-World Example
A customer notices your recommendation engine keeps suggesting men's clothing despite her purchase history clearly showing women's preferences, because her gender was incorrectly marked as 'Male' during account setup. She requests rectification, so you must correct her profile data and retrain the recommendation model to remove the bias from the incorrect gender classification that influenced thousands of past recommendations.
Common Confusion
People often think rectification only means updating a database record, but for AI systems it's much more complex since the incorrect data may have already influenced model training, requiring retraining or model adjustments. It's also confused with the right of erasure (deletion), but rectification specifically means fixing wrong information rather than removing it entirely.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, rectification is critical under HIPAA's Right of Amendment, which requires covered entities to correct in...
Finance: In finance, rectification is critical for maintaining accurate customer profiles, risk assessments, and regulatory repor...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"An individual’s right to have personal data about them corrected or amended by a business or other organization if it is inaccurate."Source: IAPP_Privacy_Glossary
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