Google No Longer Has a Chief Privacy Officer. Should You Follow Suit?
July 26, 2024 – Media MentionPeter Jackson, counsel in the intellectual property group, was featured in InformationWeek, and discussed the importance of integrating privacy considerations into product development from the beginning, rather than adding them later.
Excerpts:
“It’s probably become apparent that siloing the privacy responsibilities within an organization in the way that the chief privacy officer title tends to be a recipe for product development and other teams to feel like privacy is not their responsibility,” says Peter Jackson, counsel in the intellectual property group at law firm Greenberg Glusker. “As a result, decisions can be made that affect privacy down the line, because of the way that products are developed or designed from the beginning, or at various junctures along the way, that don't take into account the privacy ramifications of those decisions.”
Designing privacy into products is considerably easier and more effective than bolting privacy onto a product after the fact. Like IAPP’s Fennessy, Jackson also sees enterprises wanting more people responsible for privacy.
“The way that products had been developed to date hasn’t had an adequate privacy mindset from the outset,” says Jackson. “Meta has been under an FTC consent decree around privacy for what could be more than 10 years. It keeps getting revised,” says Jackson. “And if you talk to people who are involved in compliance effort, they’re around privacy. My understanding is that it’s sometimes difficult to have a global understanding of where personal information is in a bunch of different buckets, and they may not know where all of them are. And that just illustrates that one of the richest companies in the world isn’t able to internally understand what information it has that relates to a particular individual and that continues to be the case after a long period of time under this tremendous scrutiny. I think it’s indicative of the broader trend that what we're doing, the way that products have been developed to date hasn't had an adequate privacy mindset from the outset.”
