IAPP ANZ Summit 2024

Anna Funder is the author of “Stasiland,” “All That I Am,” the novella “The Girl with the Dogs,” and “Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” “Stasiland,” hailed as a “classic,” tells true stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of others who worked for the Stasi. In 2004 “Stasiland” won the U.K.’s premier award for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and was a finalist for many other awards. Anna’s novel “All That I Am” is an homage to four German anti-Hitler activists living bravely but precariously in exile in London in the 1930s. “All That I Am” garnered many literary awards including Australia’s most prestigious, the Miles Franklin Prize, and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. It spent over a year on the bestseller lists, was BBC Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime, and The Times Book of the Month. Both books are international bestsellers, published in over twenty-four countries. “Wifedom,” hailed as a “masterpiece” and a “spellbinding achievement,” was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and listed as a Best Book of the Year by the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Economist, The Times, the Independent, The Telegraph and LitHub. Originally trained as an international human rights lawyer, Anna is a former DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Australia Council Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She has lived in Paris, Berlin, and Brooklyn, and now lives in Sydney, Australia.

Caitlin Fennessy is vice president and chief knowledge officer at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, where she guides the strategic development of IAPP research, publications, communications, programming and external affairs.

Caitlin is a known privacy expert, serving as an inaugural member of the U.K. International Data Transfers Expert Council, on the German Marshall Global Task Force to Promote Trusted Sharing of Data, and on the Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board. She speaks and leads frequent public discussions on the practical impacts of privacy developments around the world.

Prior to joining the IAPP, Caitlin was the privacy shield director at the U.S. International Trade Administration, where she spent ten years working on international privacy and cross-border data flow policy issues. Caitlin also served as an adjunct professor of international privacy law at the University of Maine School of Law and University of New Hampshire School of Law. Caitlin has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in social policy from Northwestern University.

Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety commissioner. In this role, she leads the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online.

Julie has extensive experience in the non-profit and government sectors and spent two decades working in senior public policy and safety roles in the tech industry at Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe.

Her career began in Washington D.C., working in the U.S. Congress and the non-profit sector before taking on a role at Microsoft. Julie’s experience at Microsoft spanned 17 years, serving as one of the company’s first and longest-standing government relations professionals, ultimately in the role of global director for safety and privacy policy and outreach. At Twitter, she set up and drove the company’s policy, safety and philanthropy programs across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia and drove APAC-wide government relations for Adobe.

As commissioner, Julie served on the Australian MyGov User Audit Panel and on the Independent Advisory Board of the Technology Policy Design Centre. She served as co-founder and inaugural chair of the Global Online Safety Regulators Network and is a long-serving board member of the WePROTECT Global Alliance. She also serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety and on their Governance Steering Committee on Building and Defining the Metaverse. Under her leadership, eSafety has joined forces with the White House Gender Policy Council and Government of Denmark on the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Harassment and Abuse.

In 2021, Julie oversaw significant increases in the eSafety office’s budget, increased staffing levels and launched the global Safety by Design initiative. As commissioner, she has led work to stand up novel and world-first regulatory regimes under the new Online Safety Act 2021, with implementation of a sweeping new set of reforms beginning on 23 January 2022. Commissioner Inman Grant was reappointed for a further five-year term by the Australian government in January 2022.

The commissioner was recently named one of Australia’s most influential women by the Australian Financial Review and a leading Australian in Foreign Affairs by the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2020, the World Economic Forum and Apolitical appointed the commissioner as one of the #Agile50, the world’s most influential leaders reforming government.

More information can be found at www.esafety.gov.au.

Carly Kind commenced as Australia’s privacy commissioner in February 2024 for a five-year term.

As privacy commissioner, she regulates the handling of personal information by entities covered by the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and seeks to influence the development of legislation and advance privacy protections for Australians.

Kind joined from the U.K.-based Ada Lovelace Institute, where she was the inaugural director. As a human rights lawyer and leading authority on the intersection of technology policy and human rights, she has advised industry, government and non-profit companies and insitutions on digital rights, artificial intelligence, privacy and data protection, and corporate accountability in the technology sphere.

She has worked with the European Commission, the Council of Europe, numerous U.N. bodies and a range of civil society companies and insitutions. She was formerly legal director of Privacy International, a non-governmental institution dedicated to promoting data rights and governance.

Kind has a Masters of Science, International Relations (Hons) from the London School of Economics, a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, and a Bachelor of Arts (International Relations) (Hons) and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Queensland.

Dr. Jessica Lake focuses on media law, legal history, and feminist legal theory. She researches the regulation of expression, reputation and creativity — privacy, defamation, copyright — in the common law world from the early nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on gender. Her first book, "The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy," was published with Yale University Press in 2016. It argued that women first forged a "right to privacy" in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by bringing cases to prevent and prohibit the unsanctioned use of their photographic and cinematic images. Her book was shortlisted for the W.K. Hancock Prize by the Australian Historical Association. She has published widely in academic journals, and has edited books, newspapers and magazines on topics including the regulation of non-consensual and deep fake pornography, the history of privacy law, gender and technology, and defamation law and the #metoo movement. Her next book, on the gendered history of defamation law in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, "Special Damage: Slandered Women and Stained Whiteness 1790-1890," is contracted with Stanford University Press. In 2016-2017, Jessica was the Karl Loewenstein postdoctoral research fellow in jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, Massachusetts. In 2022, she received a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council for her project titled "The Colour of Sexual Slander." Jessica is currently co-editor of "History Australia." Prior to academia, she worked for several years as a media and intellectual property lawyer.

Michael Webster took up the role of privacy commissioner on 5 July 2022. Prior to this appointment he worked in the Cabinet Office, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for 14 years, and held the position of secretary of the cabinet and clerk of the executive council since March 2014. His career has focused on enabling and driving good governance, promoting democratic rights and values, developing and applying codes of conduct and behavior, and working to ensure compliance with both statutory provisions and constitutional conventions.

Since taking up the role, Webster has focused on ensuring the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is equipped to deliver on its vision of making privacy a core focus for agencies, in order to protect the privacy of individuals, enable agencies to achieve their own objectives, and safeguard a free and democratic society. That has seen a strengthening of the compliance and enforcement function, a focus on delivering on the office’s regulatory stewardship responsibilities, and an advocacy for a regulatory framework and Privacy Act that is fit for purpose in the digital age.