Our 6 takeaways from this year’s Data Privacy Day

Each year Data Privacy Day on January 28th provides a moment for us to reflect on both how as individuals we can be safer online, but also guide our teams and businesses to better respect consumer privacy, data, and trust.

This year, Transcend joined with The Rise of Privacy Tech to sponsor a day of roundtables, conversations, and networking revolving around privacy innovation—a topic we’re very passionate about!

It was a packed list of speakers too, including Google’s Chief Privacy Officer Keith Enright, Workday Chief Privacy Officer Barbara Cosgrove, privacy advisor Debra Farber, and many more, including Transcend’s CEO Ben Brook. Ben spoke alongside Professor Lorrie Cranor on the latest in privacy engineering, and with Workday’s Barbara Cosgrove on what companies can do to solve for vendor privacy gaps (we can help there, too!)

In short, it was a day full of conversations on how we can all come together to leverage privacy tech not just to drive business efficiencies, but deliver better privacy for all, grounded in greater control and transparency.

Here are 6 of our key takeaways from the day:

• What makes the perfect privacy engineer? A balance of technical chops, an awareness of the legal issues, and most importantly, understanding the human element of privacy—your customer. Here’s a tip for your design team: check out the development of a universal California privacy icon. — From Privacy Professor Lorrie Cranor.

• Why privacy equals personal control. “User control is critical, freedom of choice matters, and we need to give users the information so they can self-determine their own privacy.” — From former Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian’s opening keynote on privacy by design (see some slide highlights of her talk here.)

• From compliance to growth. Companies need to see that providing data transparency + giving customers control. One question to ask: “is a relationship enhancing opportunity to engage with them.” If you’re still focused on checkbox compliance, you’re missing the boat in demonstrating real value. — From former Cisco CPO and Privacy founder Michelle Dennedy.

• Scaling and resource maintenance. You’re never going to throw enough humans at this…it has to be a team effort between people and privacy tech. “You need to automate + unlock measurable, auditable controls, so you can operate at scale.” — From Google’s CPO Keith Enright.

• Get ahead while others play catch up. Companies that sprint to true data privacy infrastructure and an “autopilot” approach sooner rather than later are going to have innovation advantages for decades to come (something we’ve covered before on the Transcend blog, too) — From Transcend’s Ben Brook.

• Last thoughts on tools. Privacy pros deserve better tools than Excel or web-forms to manage their privacy programs. Privacy is cross-functional. The tools should be too. (We’re obviously big fans of this, see our developer-friendly tools here) — From The Rise of Privacy Tech’s Lourdes Turrecha.

Did you attend any of the talks from The Rise of Privacy Tech’s event on Data Privacy Day? If you did, let us know your takeaways by tagging @transcend_io on Twitter.

P.S.: If you’d like to learn about how Transcend can give your users a modern data privacy experience through advanced data privacy infrastructure (and with no manual processing), contact our team.