About the IAPP

Jo Davaris recently joined Booking Holdings, a world leader in online travel and related services, as its first Global Privacy Officer. She will be responsible for building and aligning a consistent privacy program across their brands (Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline, OpenTable, agoda and rentalcars.com). 

Prior to joining Booking Holdings, Jo was the first Global Chief Privacy Officer for Mercer, a world leading consulting firm, where she was responsible for developing and overseeing a global privacy program for that provided appropriate controls and risk mitigation around the use of data across the diverse lines of business, while enabling growth, innovation and opportunity. Prior to joining Mercer, Jo was the Global Head of Privacy Policy and Program Development and Privacy Leader for the Institutional & Network businesses at American Express. During her 15+ year tenure there, she held a variety of roles spanning a spectrum of pure legal (negotiating contracts with merchants and vendors) and compliance (policy creation and engagement with external sales organizations and banks) to business development (managing oil business relationships and EMV Chip marketing, communications and technical specification membership teams). Her career path eventually led her to focus on developing policies that enabled innovation around data analytics products while maintaining customer trust which developed into a specialization in global data protection, privacy policies and privacy program management. 

Prior to American Express, Jo was an attorney for the Administration for Children’s Services in NYC, where she prosecuted parents that abused and neglected their children.  

Jo is currently serving on the Education Advisory Board of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, as well as the Advisory Board of the Women, Influence and Power in Law Event. She recently served on the Board of Directors of Rising Ground, a NYC social services non-profit organization. She is also a frequent speaker at conferences and panels around Data Protection, Privacy Program Management, Information Governance and Regulatory Change Management.

She received both her JD and her BA from Fordham University.