Greetings from Portsmouth, New Hampshire!

We are just days away from Halloween, which kicks off one of my favorite stretches of the year. The Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas triumvirate fills my heart with joy, which is necessary as my soul leaves my body from January to March. Halloween gives everyone the opportunity to indulge in all types of candy, from the elite choices, such as Twix and Milky Way, to circus peanuts and Necco wafers, proof that giving us free will was a mistake.

But enough about candy.

October has been a busy time for us here at the IAPP. We recently released the latest version of the IAPP Tech Vendor Report. This iteration contains more than 250 different tech vendors. When the IAPP launched the report in 2017, it only had 44 entries. As the need for privacy technology has grown over the past two years, so have the number of companies that have entered the space.

The trend began as organizations sought to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and the California Consumer Privacy Act has resulted in a similar need for privacy technology. Tech solutions designed to tackle the CCPA have already popped up, from a tool to help companies set up a CCPA toll number to one that measures an organization’s readiness with the upcoming law.

Another area to pay attention to is data subject access requests. Plenty of vendors have created offerings to address DSARs and possibly for good reason. At a session I attended at last month’s Privacy. Security. Risk. conference in Las Vegas, privacy professionals had a lot of questions about how to handle the inquiries. As Coinbase Associate General Counsel, Global Data Privacy and Security Shahab Asghar said during the session, companies may have to decide whether to build their own solutions or buy from a third party in order to properly handle the requests they will receive as a result of the CCPA and beyond.

Of course, just because we are entering the holiday season does not mean privacy is going to take a back seat to turkeys, candy, Santa Claus and Charlie Brown. IAPP Editor Angelique Carson has been busy on Capitol Hill as lawmakers discuss whether tech giants’ dominance in the marketplace “may or may not harm consumer privacy and the role regulation should play,” as well as a hearing on data ownership and data privacy rights heard before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pitched a new data portability bill, while Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Capital One data breach. Plus, the aforementioned CCPA is a little more than two months away from going into effect.

2019 may be coming to a close, but you should not expect privacy news to slow down any time soon.