Greetings from Portsmouth, NH!

Hopefully those of you who attended last week's Global Privacy Summit have recovered and are back to 100 percent. We've spent the last week here in the office debriefing and organizing all of the feedback and ideas we received last week so we can make sense of it all and turn into helpful resources and content for all of you. Through talking with you in the hallways and networking events, attending active learning day and breakout sessions, we came back with tons of material to work with. Be assured we'll be putting them into action in the coming weeks, months, and, heck, even years. 

One medium you'll likely see us working with more is IAPP Video. For the first time, we had a team at Summit recording many of you and capturing various sessions throughout the conference. It's a work in progress, but expect more video content this year. You'll see we grabbed snippets from the Privacy Bar and Privacy Engineering Section Forums last Thursday.

During the opening panel session in the latter forum, Google Principal Engineer Lea Kissner shared some of her insight into working with her product teams. You'll see the brief video of her below. To explore this session more, be sure to check out my report on privacy engineering. It's a relatively new field, but a really important one that's still being defined each day. Though the Privacy Engineering Section Forum touched upon the regulatory environment and research community, I focused on this first panel and the discussions I heard during the group discussions. Based on what I observed that day, privacy engineering isn't just about coding and computer science — those are certainly elements that some privacy engineers employ on a daily basis — but it also involves building and maintaining systems, frameworks, methodologies, and infrastructures that support the proper use of data.

I said it last week, but I'll say it again, if you're working in this field, be sure to take part in this new section, and don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have thoughts to share on what you're doing at your company. I'd love to hear and learn more about what you're up to. 

Before I wrap up, next week is sure to be an interesting one, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify on Capitol Hill. This will surely be must-watch testimony on what has become one of the major privacy news stories in recent years. The scrutiny is definitely mounting each day. If you are interested in this area, I'll point you toward a blog post from former Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Consumer Protection Bureau Director David Vladeck. He worked on the 2011 consent decree with Facebook and doesn't mince words about whether the company violated that decree. He also suggests what Facebook could do to better respond to this privacy issue. For one, he says the company should come out and admit they violated the decree and appoint an independent ombudsperson to review its data use practices, among many other suggestions.

Do you agree with him? Why or why not? I'd love to hear from you.