This is a pivotal moment for our profession. We are overseeing a time defined by consequential changes, any one of which could alone cause their fair share of strain.
New technologies are challenging the basic assumptions of our field. New business realities are delivering a rapid broadening of responsibilities, so long as we accept them. New rules are fracturing our practice, simultaneously pushing us to do better and asking us to make impossible choices. Politics and geopolitics are sowing uncertainty.
Nevertheless, my mood is hopeful. I am writing this from the road, departing a deeply thought-provoking leadership retreat at IAPP headquarters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
This week, the significance of our current challenges were on full display in the discussions on and off stage. One speaker even beseeched us to “evolve or go extinct.”
I often carry with me a fear that our profession will ossify. That the evolution from a principles-based practice to a regulation-driven one tempts us to evolve into mere box checkers, preoccupied with dry black-letter legal risk above all other concerns.
At the retreat, Daniel Susskind, the author of "A World Without Work," added layers to this fear by describing his research into how complex human-driven results are as replicable by the alien intelligence of creative machines as blue-collar tasks are. Susskind’s keynote served its provocative purpose.
It seemed the rest of the retreat maintained an undercurrent of answering the question: Could our professional faculties really be replaced by outcome maximizing systems?
But as the conversations evolved, my fears eased. The reality is that even as privacy law becomes increasingly well defined, the forces of change are hard at work to keep our principles-based practice alive. All of the tumultuous changes above, at least some part of which the IAPP has been calling “digital entropy,” are preserving the creative, entrepreneurial and intuitive core of our profession.
The reflections of leaders in our field offered at the retreat gave me hope for the future because they reminded us about the major challenges of the past.
Data privacy has successfully fought for a seat at the corporate table. It has fostered a norms-based practice, even in the absence of clear mandates, which has only been strengthened by later rules.
The same people will do it again whether we say they work in privacy, data protection, digital governance, cyber citizenship or responsible data.
But to do it again, as multiple speakers reminded those gathered in Portsmouth, we must keep skating toward where the puck is going to be. We must keep doing the hard work of anticipating and evolving, reflecting and growing, whether or not policymakers lead the way.
Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, CIPP/US, CIPM, is a managing director in Washington, D.C., for the International Association of Privacy Professionals