Greetings, fellow privacy professionals!

This is my first post as the new Hong Kong Regional Leader for the IAPP, so I thought I would briefly introduce myself, my background and my vision on how the IAPP can help in the region.

First, I would like to thank the IAPP for the opportunity to be the first ever HK Regional Leader. As many of the existing IAPP country leaders come from a legal background, my experience is actually more from the cybersecurity side. I have about 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity field, which included a lot of data protection and privacy coverage along the way. I am currently the chief information security officer at Crypto.com, a blockchain/fin-tech firm, and sit on various boards advising on cybersecurity- and privacy-related matters. I was formally also a cybersecurity advisor at Microsoft, where I helped to drive security and GDPR initiatives in the region prior to the EU General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in May 2018. As we have seen a growing number of data breaches in all regions and industries, I hope to contribute more to the IAPP and complement the existing strong local chapter of legal privacy professionals.

So far this year, we have had an eventful KnowledgeNet, where we had the honor of having Privacy Commissioner Stephen Wong in attendance. We look forward to further collaboration with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data at future IAPP events. I’m also excited to say we already have some confirmed events we will host: one in May on data ethics and another session in June on the GDPR and blockchain.

I also had the privilege to represent the IAPP on a panel with distinguished guests from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, as well as the University of Waterloo, which has established a Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute to drive groundbreaking research and innovation in this area. In addition to this, I will be on the panel for ISACA’s CACS Conference and the Asia Pacific Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference to discuss the future of cybersecurity and privacy.

For Hong Kong, I hope to reach out to more industry practitioners to be more active with the IAPP community and look to drive privacy and security awareness through establishing partnerships in the region to help train up other industry professionals who want to take the next step to enhance their profile with privacy knowledge.

I look forward to continuing to contribute to IAPP’s Hong Kong Chapter and working closely with our local co-chairs on creating more awareness of privacy in the region. To those who will be at the IAPP’s Asia Privacy Forum in Singapore in July, I look forward to seeing you there. Please do come join my session, where I will be moderating a panel of distinguished guests to talk about “GDPR — One Year Later” and a look back on some large-scale data breaches and lessons learned.

Keep safe; keep secure.

Jason Lau
IAPP HK Regional Leader