This week is the annual conference of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) in Washington DC. According to the association, there will be over 2000 privacy officers, vendors, and consultants attending a dizzying array of sessions on an equally abundant range of topics.
Judging by the powerful line-up of speakers and the sprawling scope of the subject matter being covered, the association is even more exciting and relevant than ever. And it’s made all the more exciting by last month’s announcement of an important new initiative by the Obama Administration to promote online consumer privacy rights. Between the new EU cookie regulations coming online in May and the injection of personal privacy issues – both online and offline – as an issue during this election season, it’s a fascinating time to be in this field.
On a personal level, this will be an interesting conference for me, in that it will be my first IAPP conference after a gap of 6 years. While I’ve maintained involvement in privacy issues throughout the last several years, I stepped away from IAPP activities after many years of deep involvement. I’m so incredibly proud of what we started, that group of us as newly minted privacy officers sitting around a dinner table in DC in early 2000 discussing the idea of a privacy association. While we knew privacy would continue to be a huge area of growth, we could only guess at how vital the issues would become as new regulatory schemes like HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, CAN-SPAM, and the expansion of EU rules and other international privacy laws would dominate the scene.
I’m also very excited that Keynote will be exhibiting at the IAPP conference for the first time, giving attendees an opportunity to see the beta version of our new Web Privacy Tracking (WPT) service. WPT gives privacy officers and operations teams new visibility and insight into the previously murky world of third-party tracking appearing on highly-monetized web sites.
If you’re attending the IAPP conference, I encourage you to come by our booth and say hello to get a preview of the WPT that’s in live beta for existing MyKeynote customers.
Comments