Privacy

The news is replete with alleged actions of foreign governments and hackers trying to impact the democratic election process in the United States. It is incumbent upon the state and local governments to ensure the security of all elections.

It's been about half a year since Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was activated, and corporate legal, privacy and compliance teams are beginning to adjust to the new lay of the land. We've seen early examples of enforcement activity, and those are helping organizations better understand the long-term landscape for compliance.

It's clear that the onset of GDPR regulations and a quickly changing consumer sentiment about the sensitivity and value of their personal data will reorient a company's interactions with their customers and their information. There will be some pain points in this transition, as Facebook investors recently demonstrated, but it doesn't have to be a unilateral downturn for the tech industry.

In the legal community, professionals have embraced email. However, as increasing concerns and regulations around data security continue to evolve, the future of digital communication via email may not meet the more stringent requirements.

If 2017 was considered the “year of the data breach” as the number of incidents hit a new record high of 1,579, 2018 might get even more serious. Just a little more than halfway through 2018, the number and scale of data breaches that have already been reported is staggering.

Earlier this summer a group of security-minded executives in Chicago, long a hub for legal and financial tech, sat down for a panel discussion on anticipating and combatting cybercrime.

The entertainment industry is intensely focused on data collection and analytics as it seeks to maximize the exploitation of digital content. Just as those of us in the privacy field had begun to have a slight breather as much of the heavy lifting on the GDPR was finally behind us, lawmakers in California have passed the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA).

Ostensibly, GDPR's mission is to strengthen and unify the EU's protection of online privacy rights and promote data protection for citizens of the 28 countries currently in the EU. In the global economy, however, GDPR serves as an alarm to all countries with business flowing across Europe and well beyond. Where business flows, data follow.