Welcome to the Information Age! Alvin Toffler, noted futurist and author has called this the third societal wave; an age defined by our most valuable commodity — information. The industrial revolution ended an age when agriculture was king. In return, the industrial age has yielded its reign to a new article of trade fueled by technological innovation and the commoditization of ideas.
The speed at which innovation in and development of this new commodity occurred — and continues to occur — is unparalleled and has caused great consternation to those who would regulate and secure these new technological advances. The result is a largely untamed frontier, fraught with potential for great reward as well as great risk.
The benefits and value of this new information commodity are clear but each epoch has proven that costs related to these innovative goods are also novel and new. Pollution was largely unknown before the industrial age. Deforestation was unfathomed before agrarian societies flourished. And in this new age, we are only beginning to understand the trade-offs that rise out of the surveillance society that fuels the information age.
We are now experiencing a new wave of technical innovation thanks to generative AI models and quantum computing that threaten our known methods for safeguarding people, their data, and our business interests. This, coupled with shrinking budgets and resource constraint makes it more important now than ever that we focus on applied, proactive, and innovative approaches to information protection.
Applied: The time to discuss risks and manage business decisions at a conference table or in the boardroom must make way for application of preventative controls. Innovation is accelerating and outpacing internal and external efforts to safeguard. In the early days of privacy there were more unknowns that required debate. As expectations have matured, our tasks have become more clear and we should put them in practice without delay because tomorrow there will be new fires to fight.
Proactive: Privacy and security teams are still largely considered cost centers and as such we are unlikely to grow bigger during a down economy. We must look to improve velocity and scale for us to meet the growing demands of customers and adversaries. Investing in automated, preventative, repeatable and self-serve capabilities reduces manual effort and helps small teams also to be mighty.
Innovative: New and emerging risks are finding a home with privacy and security professionals, whether we can afford it or not. Dark patterns, children’s safety in product design, algorithmic audits, rise of quantum, production use of generative models, and the inevitable failure of encryption are but a few. The data protection function has been called to take on new innovation topics by companies and regulators alike because we navigated the ambiguous and subjectively interpreted field of data privacy and they hope we can do so again. And again.
Our books tackle these ideas by learning from one another and sharing ideas that have worked for the authors. In volume 2 we take a look at applied, proactive, and innovative approaches to issues you’re likely reading about, encountering, or perhaps already managing.
We hope you’ll find ideas that can help you translate between the business, engineers, and the public and that you’ll enjoy volume two of Privacy API.
Here is a brief glimpse of everything that the book covers:
𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐝
Deletion: From Startup to Scale-up
How do you scale, automate, and optimize your privacy operations?
Data Lifecycle — Good Data Governance is Good (for) Business!
𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞
The ROI of the New AI-Driven Privacy Platforms
Think Global, Act Local: Handling Data Privacy and Compliance in the Government Sector
Quebec law 25: Progress for privacy and a time crunch for organizations
𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞
AI is the bomb
Does ChatGPT Know About You
You can download the ebook here — https://bit.ly/3BfftVS
Thanks to our Authors : Jonathan Wilde, Kimberly L., Greg Vaisberg, Steven Kaplan, Kalyan Chakravarthy, Mark Pilon, Kate Lapointe, Bill Schaumann, & Priyadarshi [PD] Prasad.
Sincere thanks to Jutta Williams for editing this ebook along with Niramayee Sarpotdar & Minal Sher for doing the illustrations and art work.