As artificial intelligence transforms our organizations and the way we engage with the world, there is an urgent need to scale and professionalize the workforce that will be tasked with the practical application of AI governance. A professional AI governance workforce can navigate the sociotechnical challenges raised by AI systems to ensure AI is developed, integrated and deployed in line with emerging AI laws and policies. Beyond mitigating risks, professionalization of AI governance will buil... Read More

Privacy management vendor Osano announced a USD25 million round of Series B funding led by Baird Capital Aug. 10. Osano co-founder and CEO Arlo Gilbert said the company will utilize the capital infusion to expand multiple departments and invest in research and development, in part.  "At Osano's inception, we had a singular focus: revolutionizing data privacy and compliance while growing responsibly, and this raise is a testament to that focus," Gilbert said in a statement. "With this raise, we... Read More

As more jurisdictional privacy regulations come online and compliance demands increase in complexity, operationalizing privacy programs require privacy professionals to have more skill than ever before. But what happens when there is a deficit of professionals able to meet the demand for top talent to fill vacant roles? In response to growing workforce needs among customers, DataGrail launched a new managed services solution that contracts privacy management services for its clients. Services a... Read More

Privacy management software company OneTrust secured USD150 million in funding. The company announced support from Sands Capital and Al Gore's Generation Investment Management, as well as its current USD4.5 billion valuation. "Our solutions have never been more mission critical. In the face of changing regulations and new business initiatives like AI, organizations need the technology to drive trust to the center of their operations and manage the complex web of privacy, security, ethics, and ES... Read More

What am I worth and how do I increase my value as a privacy professional? What do I need to pay my privacy staff to attract and retain them? These are the recurring questions hiring managers and specialists have asked for the last two decades as the privacy profession exploded and morphed in multiple directions, and resource models have increasingly become strained. Why have they been so hard to answer? The short answer is: constant flux. Since I joined the privacy ranks in 2000, near the birth... Read More

Privacy technology company OneTrust announced a series of changes to its board of directors and governance structure Wednesday, which it says positions the company for future growth.  Under the revised governance arrangement, CEO Kabir Barday, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM, CIPT, FIP, will be joined by Coatue Management's Thomas Laffont and Insight Partners' Richard Wells. Current board members Alan Dabbiere, David Dabbiere and John Marshall will depart from the board, which now seeks "four new indepen... Read More

The largest companies across the technology sector have been hit by tens of thousands of layoffs in recent months. Unable to maintain major growth experienced during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many such companies look to cut back and privacy professionals have not been immune. Just last week, Google announced it is laying off 12,000 employees and Amazon notified employees of a second round of layoffs as part of a plan to reduce staff by 18,000 people. Earlier this month, Salesforce cu... Read More

Without a doubt, 2022 was a packed year for privacy-related news and developments. But according to Goodwin Partner and IAPP Westin Emeritus Senior Fellow Omer Tene, 2023 is set to call and raise the stakes. To be sure, 2023 didn’t hesitate. On Jan. 4, just a few days before we sat down for our interview, the Irish Data Protection Commission levied a massive 390 million euro fine on Meta social networks Facebook and Instagram. Yet, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In this episode of The Priv... Read More

Last year was a rollercoaster year for data protection and privacy professionals, but expect 2023 to call and raise 2022’s activity at the state, federal and international levels. Privacy, as we all know, is recession-proof. These will be some of the highlights: US state laws go into force The most important development this year is the entry into force of U.S. state privacy laws, including the California Privacy Rights Act and Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act Jan. 1; Colorado’s and Conne... Read More

Data privacy made more news than ever in 2022. The usual peaks and valleys the IAPP Editorial Team observed in years prior were replaced by an unprecedentedly busy news cycle that never seemed to let up, which begs the question: What developments were most noteworthy for the privacy profession?  Here's a rundown of what we saw over the past year and what's on the horizon for 2023. Ukraine Looming over developments in 2022 was Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. In response, the IAPP cont... Read More

A recent statement from Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, opens a new chapter in the never-ending story of profiling cookies. In order to understand the weight of the Garante's words, we must look back to June 10, 2021, when the DPA issued a new set of cookie guidelines and changed the rules for online behavioral advertising in Italy. The Garante mandated website operators to show a cookie banner as soon as a user accesses the website and present a user-friendly option to express ... Read More

Consumers worldwide say data transparency is a top priority when it comes to trusting organizations with their personal data. They look to their national government to take a primary role in protecting data and continue to be very supportive of privacy laws in their countries. Consumers are also increasingly taking action to protect their own data by exercising their privacy rights and switching providers when necessary. They tend to support artificial intelligence and automated decision-making,... Read More

Apple CEO Tim Cook joined the keynote stage Tuesday at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2022 in Washington, D.C., to once again emphasize his company's mantra that privacy is a fundamental human right. In the highly anticipated speech, which was livestreamed and covered by television outlets CNBC and Fox, Cook acknowledged that protecting privacy is not easy, but added, "it is one of the most essential battles of our time."  An issue of focus for Cook was concerns that some "policymakers are taki... Read More

Kalinda Raina’s work in privacy has spanned some of the biggest names in technology — Nintendo, Apple and LinkedIn. As Nintendo’s first global head of privacy, Raina, CIPP/US, played a key role in launching new video game technologies with privacy in mind. At Apple, where she led the Americas privacy team, Raina explored ways to enhance privacy protections for children. Now, as LinkedIn’s vice president and head of global privacy, she leads the company’s privacy team, overseeing compliance with... Read More

Just six years ago, privacy issues were not on the radar of many company leaders, but today, the subject is undoubtedly a board-level one. It’s a progression IBM’s Chief Privacy Officer and AI Ethics Board Chair Christina Montgomery has witnessed first-hand. In 2015, when Montgomery served as secretary of the board at IBM, she said privacy issues were not as prominent a topic of discussion for investors and boards generally. Four years later, as the EU General Data Protection Regulation took ef... Read More

Growing up with a deep passion for sharks that left her wanting to “spend all day everyday with them,” Melanie Ensign pursued a college degree in marine biology. About halfway through the program, Ensign realized she was not particularly excited by jobs in the field, so she changed course, a decision that ultimately led her to cybersecurity and privacy. “If you were to ask me, was it a waste of time for me to study marine biology if this is where I was going to end up? Absolutely not,” said Ens... Read More

Consumers around the world are increasingly taking action to protect their data, by exercising their data rights under existing privacy laws or by no longer buying from organizations that don’t properly protect their data. They are highly supportive of existing privacy laws and support little or no relaxation in privacy protections to respond to the ongoing health crisis. They are also very concerned about the use of personal data in many artificial intelligence applications. These are some of ... Read More

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to present new privacy challenges from mandated vaccinations to remote work, and new privacy laws and regulations emerge throughout the U.S. and across the world, the need for privacy professionals shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the privacy job market is seeing the opposite, TRU Staffing Partners Founder and CEO Jared Coseglia and Hintze Law Founder and Managing Partner Susan Hintze, CIPP/US, CIPT, FIP, said during a LinkedIn Live with IAPP Senior We... Read More

When the Viennese cartoonist Joseph Keppler arrived in Missouri in 1868, it would be three decades before his work captured the zeitgeist of America’s Gilded Age.     Towards the latter half of the 19th century, the United States was a land where the barons of new industry reigned supreme, where a corporate elite emerged with unprecedented power over systems of governance. It was fertile ground for an iconic Keppler spread. In between the pages of a January 1889 edition of Puck – known as the ... Read More

Voice-activated products and services are proliferating, while voice-recognition technology is on the rise. In addition to popular voice-activated assistants, call centers are beginning to use advanced voice intelligence technology in novel ways. The technology could lead to plenty of innovation, but the potential privacy, safety and fairness issues will need some thinking. In his new book "The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet," Jose... Read More

Regulations and policies alone won’t get us to a world that effectively respects privacy. To get there, we need multiple things: (1) systems we can trust to robustly implement policy, (2) technology that enables better choices than the ones we have today and (3) a deep understanding of the wide spectrum of humans who interact with our systems. In short, we need privacy engineering. Organizations’ understanding of privacy engineering and their need for it is evolving rapidly alongside new techno... Read More

It could be argued the EU General Data Protection Regulation has led to widespread global data protection and privacy, with organizations around the world recognizing the value of good data governance. Of course, the less glamorous impact has been the very different privacy practices that have emerged globally, with both organizations and enforcement agencies interpreting these principles slightly differently and resulting in differing ways of how compliance can and should be achieved. A data p... Read More

Way back in January 2020, the U.K. only had a handful of confirmed cases of COVID-19. Little did U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham know that in a few months she would be opining on contact-tracing applications that would soon be downloaded by millions of citizens in an effort to combat an escalating pandemic. It has been more than a year since the pandemic disrupted activity on a global scale, and while some small signs of hope from the worldwide emergency are starting to appear, t... Read More

IAPP CEO and President J. Trevor Hughes, CIPP, hosted The Nature Conservancy's Chief Ethics, Compliance and Privacy Officer Michelle Beistle during the IAPP’s “Profiles in Privacy” series April 21 on LinkedIn Live. On a kayaking trip in North Carolina, Michelle Beistle, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM, and her family came across what she described as “a bridge to nowhere.” It was a pedestrian bridge surrounded on both sides by wooded land that in the early 1980s was facing development when it was purchas... Read More

For decades, people have proclaimed a now-common refrain that "privacy is dead." So get on with it, they say.  You probably know some of the most famous of the post-privacy pundits. No doubt, the oft-quoted Scott McNealy, then CEO at Sun Microsystems, eternally quipped, "You have zero privacy anyway. ... Get over it." In 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that social norms were changing and people would go along with Facebook's nudging toward more data sharing. You can even go back to 19... Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the world has been well-documented by now, and it will likely be years for industries to recover from the drastic disruptions they encountered in 2020. However, privacy has been one of the few exceptions. As work, school and health care appointments shifted to digital, a whole new slate of privacy issues emerged. Because of this shift, privacy professionals continued to be in demand even as other industries scale back their hiring practices. Regardless of the t... Read More

Recent years have been kind to privacy-enhancing technologies. And that might just be the beginning.  Laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act have made PETs necessary for organizations to stay on top of their compliance obligations. Due to the increased demand for the tools, investors also turned their eyes to the privacy tech market, investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster the development of the space. Now U.S. lawmakers have dec... Read More

Weeks before the world shut down in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, OneTrust received $210 million in Series B funding, which, at the time, put the privacy management software company's estimated value at $2.7 billion. Ten months later, the technology vendor bookended its year with similar investment news. On Monday, OneTrust announced it closed a $300 million Series C funding round, led by the equity firm TCV and with participation from existing investors Coatue and Insight Partners. ... Read More

In a year clouded by difficult developments for nearly everyone around the world, glimmers of good news still shine down upon us from time to time. Today, a ray of light illuminates the powerful growth of the privacy profession and the burgeoning privacy tech industry that undergirds our complex data protection ecosystem. I was delighted to hear this week that OneTrust has been identified by Inc. as the fastest growing company in the U.S. No, not the fastest growing privacy-tech business in the... Read More

Inc. has been publishing a list of the fastest growing American companies since 1979. The magazine started by shining a spotlight on the top 100 publicly held small companies before gradually expanding to rank the top 5,000 fastest growing privately held companies. For the first time in the history of the Inc. list, the top spot has been captured by a privacy technology company. On Wednesday, the magazine named OneTrust as the fastest growing privately held company in America. The 2020 Inc. 5,... Read More