View from the top on GDPR impact: Chief Privacy Officers

As we have now all survived #GDPRday, I thought it might be interesting to hear the views of Chief Privacy Officers.

This post is intended as the first of a few, sharing interviews with senior leadership roles. Those roles with greatest responsibility for GDPR & involvement in continued work to achieve full compliance.

To start, as we make our way around the pantheon of today’s C-Suite roles, let’s start with the one most aligned with GDPR. Beyond just creating DPOs, as required of some organisations, a number of businesses have chosen to create the job title Chief Privacy Officer (CPO).

I quite like this approach, as it emphasises the authority of this role & cultural need to consider personal data privacy as part of all senior decisions making. So, as we haven’t had as much video on this site in recent months, in this post I will share video interviews with a number of CPOs.

Lets hear their views on GDPR readiness & the changes needed within their organisations…

Chief Privacy Officers: Ingvild Næss (Schibsted)

A good start is this interview with Ingvild. She is CPO for a global media agency, working across 22 countries, so with a volume of data processing that requires a DPO role.

Apologies that this interview is a bit simplistic (and at times advertorial), however, I wanted to include it because of the approach Ingvild and her team have taken to transparency. Responding to this key principle of GDPR, they have chosen to move away from lengthy privacy policies and have instead developed a much more engaging video.

A positive case study of seeing GDPR as a business opportunity, to demonstrate transparency of data usage & provide the user with effective controls for permissions etc.

Chief Privacy Officers: Stephen Deadman (Facebook)

This interview might be a surprise, firstly because Facebook is very negatively associated with data protection at the moment & because Stephen is actually deputy Global CPO at Facebook.

Clearly since this interview, the whole Cambridge Analytics scandal has broken & Mark Zuckerberg has rightly been hauled before US Senate & UK select committees. However, most large tech companies also have a lot of right thinking people working to improve on legacy of tech & profit focussed innovation.

It’s only a short one, but it’s encouraging to hear in this interview, Stephen’s focus on designing easier user tools & starting with a focus on the person (data subject). Let’s hope that his advice for start-ups also now applies to how Facebook choose those with whom they share data.

Chief Privacy Officers: Christina Cabella (IBM)

Finally, another tech giant CPO interview, as the approach of such businesses will impact how many others achieve GDPR compliance. As the interviewer raises, it is encouraging that IBM has appointed a European as their global CPO.

In this video, Christina shares her conviction that GDPR is an opportunity for businesses. It’s also good to hear her emphasis on consistency & collaboration between US & European data standards, just a shame she didn’t have anything more specific to share. You can see more reality behind this in IBM’s GDPR promises.

Given this interview, I was enticed to dig a bit deeper into IBM’s approach. That led me to discover their creation of a GDPR Evangelist role (Richard Hogg) & this interview with him at Data2020 Summit. This is well worth a watch as a more detailed view of what matters in GDPR compliance. His advice on topics like data retention, Master Data Management, metadata, role of Data Science, and work needed to achieve trusted data – make sense to me.

Chief Privacy Officers: what would you share?

I hope those interviews were interesting. It would have been great to share from a wider range of sectors & sizes of businesses.

Perhaps you can help? If you are a Chief Privacy Officer and would be willing to share your experience of working towards GDPR compliance, I’d love to interview. Please get in touch.

Meanwhile, please feel free to share your comments or advice in comment boxes below or on social media.

Coming next, an interview with a leading CDO. More views from the Top Table…