IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2022 Recap

This past week I attended my first IAPP Global Privacy Summit. It was a wonderful experience to be in person with so many privacy professionals and to hear firsthand about their challenges. Many people focused on the key note speakers which included:

• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, spoke about the privacy issues that drive and divide the major tech companies 
• Lina Khan, Chair, Federal Trade Commission, who in her first public address spoke about how the FTC will leverage its rulemaking process to address data security. 
• Brad Smith, President and Vice-Chair of Microsoft, stated that the failure of the US to pass a federal privacy law makes the US less globally competitive

When I asked privacy professionals what they took away from the event, most of them spoke about the practical things they heard about how to operationalize privacy. Here is a summary of my takeaways from the event:

1. The business benefits from building trust

Many privacy professionals talked about how they have small teams and small budgets and expressed how challenging it is to get funding and support from other people in their business. Support from other people in the business is critical as new regulations are rolled out and companies need to really examine their data practices.

By emphasizing the benefits of trust to the business and business growth and measuring how their contributions helped the bottom line, privacy professionals felt that they had a better chance of getting buy-in and budget and cooperation from their teams.

2. Consent is more than cookies

During a speaking session featuring WireWheel’s CEO, Justin Antonipillai, Ruth Boardman from Bird and Bird and Dona Fraser from BBB, they talked about, while consent today is cookie consent, with the new regulations, it is moving towards getting and managing consent across the multiple channels (including phone, tv, and other devices) in real-time. This will make managing consent more difficult but also brings opportunities. If they do it right, companies can use consent as a way to build trust and collect more first-party data.

3. Marketing + Privacy: teamwork and trust are key

On a panel that I spoke on that included CMO Juliette Kopecky from LinkSquares, GC and CPO Andy Dale from Alyce, and Attorney Scott Lashway, privacy professionals were highly engaged and asked questions about how and when they should get involved with marketing as marketing evaluates new technologies. The panel suggested that privacy should get involved with marketing early and often while keeping in mind marketing’s motivation – driving revenue. The privacy team can offer a lot of value to the marketing team as marketing, especially in the cookieless world, relies on buyer trust.

Marketing can also help privacy teams to market their message to sales, clients, and other stakeholders in the company.