How publicly available information can be combined to create security, reputational and financial risks for families.

Risk rarely stems from a single disclosure – although it can, so it is worth implementing a privacy strategy around major projects or transactions that are likely to leave documentation in the public domain. More often, risks arise from hostile actors drawing together fragments of information from across social media, public records, and proprietary databases to gain insight into an individual and their world.

Details on property ownership, family connections, social media activity and travel patterns may seem innocuous enough as isolated pieces of information but reviewed together they can provide a surprisingly detailed picture of an individual or family. In the wrong hands, that information can be used to facilitate cyber-attacks, frauds, extortion, media intrusion, or other harms.

Moreover, these risks – whether they are cyber, reputational, or security related – can rapidly converge. For example, a data breach can easily trigger media scrutiny or extortion attempts.

Ultimately, privacy and reputation are more closely linked than many people might think. Privacy is what people know about you, and reputation is what people say about you. The two are in some sense inseparable, and impacts on privacy and reputation have real world consequences: transactions disrupted, financing or professional services withdrawn, and loss of stakeholder confidence.

Why privacy should be viewed as a resilience issue rather than simply a personal preference.

Resilience comes from knowledge and control of your profile, not obscurity which can be a real weakness in the event of a public controversy.

A resilient individual or family is not necessarily one with no public profile, but one that understands what information is available and how it appears to those who are outside looking in. Effective management of privacy is therefore not secrecy but control of your online profile.

A controlled profile builds resilience by ensuring that there is accurate and up-to-date information available and that this is focused appropriately to meet your business and personal needs. Ideally, this type of controlled content would be developed on an ongoing basis to maintain resilience over time and should work hand in glove with a privacy strategy that addresses both business needs and personal security.

Practical steps families, family offices and advisers can take to manage emerging risks.

You can't manage risks if you don’t know what they are and how they are specific to you and your family or business. The starting point is understanding what a motivated and well-resourced actor could find about you if they chose to do so. This can be identified through a comprehensive privacy audit of your digital, corporate and personal footprint.

We often tell clients that you need to assess your profile in the same way a bad actor would. That requires an honest, forensic assessment of what information is accessible, how it could be exploited and where the greatest vulnerabilities lie.

Only once you understand that can you develop an effective strategy to mitigate risk. Without that diagnosis, any strategy that you develop risks being based on guesswork.

There are a range of practical measures, habits, and policies that informed families and advisers can implement to reduce exposure and strengthen resilience. It is wise to address this proactively as new information is constantly entering the public domain, and managing these risks is an ongoing process and not a one-off exercise.