Celebrating International Data Privacy Day

We celebrate Data Privacy Day as a reminder of the importance of protecting personal information. It’s been nearly five years since the GDPR was adopted, influencing how data is defined, handled and disclosed, not just within the jurisdiction of the European Union, but across the globe. Since that time, a wave of major data protection laws has passed, each imparting their own terminology and guidelines around personal information. 

While we look towards the future, we acknowledge that despite a global pandemic that restricted travel and dampened economic activity, privacy has remained a central topic. The Brazilian General Data Protection Law came into effect, despite calls to delay it from their president. California voters passed “CCPA 2.0” just shortly after the initial CCPA reached the enforcement date. The much anticipated draft of China’s data protection law was published, drawing the attention of privacy experts worldwide. 

In the spirit of Data Privacy Day, we are sharing some reflections on privacy and predictions for what’s ahead from our team, customers and the Data Citizens community:

“The intersection of data ethics and the application of AI will result in new regulatory frameworks. With an increase in public awareness around these topics, individuals will want to regain control of how their data is used in algorithms.”

Teresa Rojas

Senior Product Manager, Governance at Collibra

“Data governance will play a crucial role in data protection in 2021 and beyond. A mature data governance solution will make it much easier for businesses to find correct and trusted data for Data Protection Impact Assessments and data subject access requests.” – Jonas Sinnaeve, Data Analyst at Data Trust Associates

“Given recent events in 2020, we expect increased awareness among consumers that their online activity does have real world effects including how it’s shared and monetized today. This awareness will increase the pressure for additional regulations to govern the handling of consumer data.”

Stijn “Stan” Christiaens

Co-Founder and CTO at Collibra

“The amount of legwork it takes to manage a privacy compliant enterprise has increased dramatically over the past five years. And there is a real need to develop industry standard approaches that can be used to address complex and, in many cases, vague requirements”. – Amanda Weare, Associate General Counsel, IP, Product and Privacy at Collibra

“Privacy compliance can no longer be a simple checkbox item that one part of the business addresses. For modern businesses, privacy compliance is central to its DNA and critical to safeguarding its most important asset: data.” – Sergiusz Rotman, CIPP/E, CIPP/M, Product Manager, Data Privacy at Collibra

“The data privacy world has had some great developments in the last few years: privacy and cybersecurity have become more integrated, there’s a greater focus on third party risk management, employee training on data privacy has largely increased, and more companies are adopting a single, enterprise-wide privacy strategy. Looking ahead I think we will see privacy become even more of a key business differentiator and, and along with that there will be an increased demand for privacy professionals.”–Umit Bhargava, Senior Developer, Rabobank

With new developments in AI gaining momentum and more people working remotely, I think we will see efforts in building AI-driven privacy firewalls in the future. This could be a device that sits in the home, blocking and de-identifying sensitive data from being passed outside the home based on natural language detection. –Mark Kuhnhenn, Data Governance Architect

The GDPR and CCPA had set the stage for how we initially defined privacy rights and data. Moving forward, we recognize that while it’s difficult to predict all the privacy-related events and responses in 2021, we can expect more, not less, scrutiny and attention concerning data privacy requirements. 

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