Are we living "The Truman Show"? I had a chat with Mads Flensted Hauge, Chairman of DAMA Denmark and DPO and Data Governance Manager at a Danish health care provider.

We looked at Data Privacy from four different perspectives:

The society perspective 

• What is data privacy and why is it important? 
• How transparent are we as citizens?
• What considerations need to take place when we talk about data sharing across public agencies? 

The company perspective 

• Why should we care about privacy in our company? Are we just talking about compliance? 
• Where should the DPO role be places in a company?
• Does your HR system need a feature to show your employees home on google maps?

The data worker perspective 

• What does this mean for us data workers in how we treat data? 
• What does privacy by design mean?
• What is the impact of AI, ML,… on privacy?

The personal perspective

• What can I do to keep my personal data save? 
• How many smart devices do I need in my home? Can I live without a washing machine with Wi-Fi connection?
• Has the corona pandemic made it even more ok to share private heath data?

Here are my key takeaways:

• Convenience drives change and digitalization in public sector - and sometimes privacy becomes the victim for efficiency.
• To apply GDPR you need to apply different knowledge areas of Data Management. That is why these two are closely combined.
• It has always been hard to show the value of a data management journey from the start, but with GDPR and the ominous notion of fines, data management got the ear of the C-level.
• Since GDPR is framed as compliance, it leads companies to do just the bare minimum to be compliant.
• GDPR forces you to get a deeper knowledge about your business.
• There is an ethics dimension to data privacy, and DPOs are on the forefront to instigate this ethics site.
• A DPO does not just write policies and procedures but must navigate company culture to promote ethics and privacy actively.