Making this list was so much fun. 

When my boss, Sam Pfeifle, charged me with creating a privacy-focused podcast a couple years ago, I was slightly annoyed. I didn't know anything about podcasts, I didn't even listen to podcasts, and it sounded like it was going to be some weekly chore I would dread. 

I was so wrong. Growing a podcast not only turned out to be an incredibly satisfying creative outlet for me, but it also helped me to understand the industry and the people who staff it so much better. These one-on-one conversations with incredibly intelligent and capable people made me feel part of our profession in a way I hadn't tapped into before, and I also learned so much about everything from the way EU institutions operate to how advertising technology works to why Jay Edelson is going after Kanye West for alleged privacy violations.

We've got some very loyal listeners at The Privacy Advisor Podcast, and I'm proud to say our downloads sky rocketed this year. Thousands upon thousands of you listened to me complain about how hot the summer in D.C. is and kept tuning in every week as I worked to get better at delivering you the kind of interviews that might feel helpful to you as you work to become better privacy pros. I'm really proud of this year's catalogue for the breadth we covered together and the conversations some of these podcasts incited among us online — namely on Twitter. This project is personal to me, largely because it brought me closer to you, my peers, the people I'm working for. 

Thanks for tuning in and for letting me into your headphones. Catch you in January for a whole new season. 

Best,

Angelique

Matthieson on why online advertising will survive this massive shift

The ad tech industry is facing a crisis of sorts, depending on whom you ask. The big deal is that the GDPR places importance on transparency and user consent. And to date, those are two things the ad tech industry has been sort of lucky enough to on without a whole lot of. In this episode, Matthias Matthiesen, CIPP/E, who heads the Interactive Advertising Bureau's privacy and public policy in Brussels, described the problems at hand and IAB’s proposed solutions — solutions not everyone agrees with. 

On why the CCPA is bad law

The New York Times refers to him as Silicon Valley's "baby faced boogeyman" for his aggressive court takedowns of tech behemoths. And he's got a very firm grasp on the global privacy and data protection legislative landscape. In this episode, plaintiff’s attorney Jay Edelson talked about a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for alleged violation of biometric privacy law, and another against Kanye West over alleged consumer privacy violations. Edelson also discussed why he thinks the new California Consumer Privacy Act is no good. 

How to raise kids in the digital age

David Reitman is a board-certified adolescent medicine specialist. Marc Groman, CIPP/US, served as the senior adviser for privacy in the Obama White House at the Office of Management and Budget. Together, they’re raising an 11 year old. In this live recording at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit, Groman and Reitman discussed the complications of raising children in today's rapidly evolving digital world, where the pressures to be online are real, and the pitfalls are plentiful.

What does your life look like on May 26?

So, the big day finally arrived. Years of blood (well, maybe not blood), sweat and tears culminated in that momentous occasion: GDPR day. So, would anything change? In this fun-loving episode, privacy pros who'd been working hard to help companies achieve compliance discussed what their lives would look like on May 26.

Ready, set, GDPR

Gabe Maldoff is a young guy. He graduated law school in 2015, got himself a fellowship at the IAPP's Westin Center, and then immediately went to work at London's Bird & Bird. And just as he was adjusting to life in the real world, the world itself was adjusting to what would be expected of it under Europe's new privacy regime via the GDPR. In this episode, Maldoff talked about how his early experiences in Tanzania shaped his future career, establishing himself at this unprecedented time in privacy and data protection, and his predictions for U.K. data protection policies post-Brexit.

What Carpenter means for the future of digital surveillance

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the government generally must have a warrant to gather location data from cellphones. But now that the dust has settled a bit, what can we take away from the case, and how might this change the trajectory of digital surveillance policy in the U.S.? In this episode, Professor Orin Kerr of the USC Gould School of Law and Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union discussed why the case is so significant and what it could mean for the future of digital surveillance, the third-party doctrine and how the Fourth Amendment applies.

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: How do we deal with viral hate online?

Anyone using the internet today is surely aware of the viral hate that displays itself everywhere, from social media platforms to newspaper comment sections to group chat forums. It is in such forums that marginalized groups face the kind of cyberbullying that surely exists on our streets but seemingly not to the extremes we see when users can hide behind a screen. In this live recording, to commemorate Pride Month, Chris Wolf talked strategies to combat viral hate online in the name of protecting those who are especially targeted, including the LGBTQ community.

Product design as an exercise of manipulation and control

Our modern privacy frameworks, with their emphasis on gaining informed consent from consumers in order to use their data, are broken models. That's according to Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In this episode, Hartzog discussed the ways that, given such models, technologies are designed at the engineering level to undermine user privacy. “We will be worn down by design; our consent is preordained,” he says.

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Johnny Ryan part 2, on ad tech's crisis

You may have heard Johnny Ryan on this podcast before. Last year, he came on to talk about the ad tech industry and what needs to happen for it to thrive under the General Data Protection Regulation. Ryan says, while there's some movement in the direction he thinks will best serve the industry — namely, advertising without collecting any personal data online at all, there isn't enough. In this episode, Ryan discussed what he believes needs to change, and how, for the industry to save itself.

FTC talks robocall enforcement 

In our continuing series on robocalls, U.S. Federal Trade Commission Attorney Ian Barlow, in charge of running the do-not-call-list program and bringing cases against illegal robocallers, talked about enforcement. It’s an area of intense focus for the agency, which has also paired with the Federal Communications Commission and private industry to try and find solutions.