This is my first letter as the incoming president for iappANZ in 2015, so a little about me and then a lot about the exciting things happening in our region! I have had the absolute pleasure to support Emma Hossack in her two-year tenure as president. Readers of this Digest will no doubt have enjoyed reading Emma’s letters, and I will strive to provide the same level of insight, wit and enthusiasm!

I have served on the iappANZ Board for three years, two of those as vice president. I am a lawyer (yes, one of those!) practicing in the area of Intellectual Property & Technology for 12 years at a leading Australian law firm and moving to an in-house legal counsel role at Serco nearly two years ago where my role cuts across all facets of sectors—BPO, Transport, Immigration, Health, Justice and Community.

I started practicing law in 2001 around about the same time as Australian privacy laws extended coverage of the Privacy Act to the private sector. What was known as the National Privacy Principles set out standards in relation to private-sector organisations collecting, using and disclosing, keeping secure, providing access to and correcting personal information.

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Needless to say, as a law graduate, I was given many research tasks to investigate the application of these principles to our clients, write compliance manuals, pull together PowerPoint slides and draft Q&As, client news alerts, etc., etc. (Not great for time-billing purposes but fantastic for growing my privacy brain!) I quickly became very well versed in the privacy-compliance world and therein started my privacy career.

As you’ll read below, our Privacy@Play summit was a fantastic event that traversed all the hot topics in privacy. You will see the issues examined in the wide press coverage for our event this year. We were very fortunate to have Larry Irving (U.S.), Stephen Deadman (UK) and Dr. Libby Morris (Scotland) share their international insights across new technologies, business models and e-health implementation.