Welcome back from the holiday season APAC privacy pros.

As we begin to get back to the office in most cases across the region, we're greeted with all manner of threats and opportunities. It's for us as a community of dedicated privacy professionals to take these on and set our teams and organizations up for success into 2024 and beyond.

While we were all celebrating the holiday season and relaxing with family and friends after a busy year in privacy, the Australian Information Commissioner launched an official inquiry into social media giant TikTok. Allegations of misuse of digital marketing pixels in order to harvest user data and activity without proper consent led to the inquiry, which will help determine if further action or enforcement might be required.

"When serious allegations of this matter are raised, we expect that they will be cooperating fully with the privacy commissioner," Australia Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said of TikTok.

Data Privacy Day, or Data Protection Day 2024, will be marked next week 29 Jan. This annual reminder to all in the privacy professional community offers an opportunity to take stock and look ahead to the challenges of the coming cycle. A core thesis for the coming year is there exists a state of digital entropy across the global policy landscape related to privacy, and particularly artificial intelligence governance, regulatory policymaking. 

The structure and design frameworks existing within the privacy environment are well-equipped to handle these digital curveballs, however, AI governance and regulation is now being challenged and needs to adopt a similar level of cohesion and consistency. Our privacy professional community should step up and take on this hard work and policymakers and regulators across the U.S., Europe and APAC region can advocate for the professionalization of AI governance.

On a personal level, I'm thrilled to be back to work and hoping to deliver consistently better outcomes for the individual and organizational members of the IAPP community across the ANZ and APAC region. I'm particularly looking to bring together smaller, discrete peer groups of privacy and AI governance professionals to meet, network and share common questions and experiences in a safe and supported environment. I encourage all members and interested guests to watch out for IAPP KnowledgeNet events in your region to come together and learn from each other — these are some of the best opportunities available to members, in my opinion.

I look forward to catching up with members and colleagues over the course of the weeks ahead.

Warm regards.