Former Microsoft CPO: Companies Check Each Other for Privacy Protections
SAN DIEGO -- Companies are good at policing each other to ensure a “trust ecosystem” exists, said Julie Brill, expert in residence at Harvard Law School Innovation Labs and former chief privacy officer at Microsoft (see 2505300023). She was a keynote speaker during the IAPP's privacy and security conference Friday.
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While “right now, there's a lot of focus on … the consumer space [or] the individual user space,” with deepfakes and age assurance and fraud, what “gets lost … in this conversation is the value of what is happening in the enterprise space,” she said.
“Companies are basically checks and balances with each other,” and “are taking on the role of ensuring that we have a trusted ecosystem,” Brill added.
She said that Microsoft and some of the other biggest companies in the world, as well as governments, want to ensure that personal data, valuable IP and any company secrets “will be incredibly protected.”
Yet conversations about privacy protections and concerns are still worth having, Brill said. While companies understand the need for trust, “they have lots of other pressures and lots of risks” they are thinking about as well. Having empathy and treating these conversations “as much more of a partnership” helps to really effectuate change in a company.
Though “incrementally, progress is being made” on the privacy legislation and regulation front, Brill said, it's also getting harder as “we have to think about privacy in the context of AI” and “security and digital safety,” which “is more complicated.” But it also provides a “massive” opportunity for businesses to figure out how to make things easier.