Security Boulevard: What Is Data in Vicinity?

Published by Mike Fong on February 15, 2019

Smartphone surveillance has opened up an entirely new avenue of exposure for high-value enterprise information, forcing many security professionals to rethink how they see data. A different class of data, known as data in vicinity, encompasses this new way of thinking. Joining the three established types of data (data at rest, data in transit and data in use), data in vicinity refers to the data in the presence of a smartphone or other data-capturing, internet-connected device. This includes any audio that can be picked up by the device’s microphones—such as conversations and environmental noise—as well as any visual data that can be picked up by the cameras, such as images of people and spaces.