History was made Friday night, April 12, when the largest ever privacy class-action verdict was announced. A federal jury in Oregon decided it would tell health supplement marketer ViSalus to pay $925 million in damages after it was charged by a certified class of 800,000 people with making 2 million illegal robocalls. It’s unusual not only in that it’s the highest amount ever awarded, but also in that privacy class—action cases often don’t ever go to trial. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Jay Edelson, whose firm argued the class-action for the plaintiffs' bar, talks us through the legal victory, the significance of the ruling and what it could mean for the future of privacy litigation in the U.S. 

Eduardo Ustaran is global co-head of the Hogan Lovells Privacy and Cybersecurity practice, and he's widely recognized as one of the world's leading privacy and data protection lawyers. In this episode of the podcast, host Angelique Carson talks to Ustaran about what's happening in the U.K. on Brexit and what that might mean for data protection in the region. He also gives us a download on progress related to the ePrivacy Regulation. With Romania at the helm, fulfilling residency of the Council of the European Union, the ball seems to be inching even closer towards the line. 

On Capitol Hill this week, Congress held two back-to-back hearings on a potential U.S. federal privacy bill. The aim was to gain insights from expert witnesses on what such a bill should contain. At the first hearing, at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, industry and advocates debated how prescriptive a federal law should be. At the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Wednesday, lawmakers asked witnesses whether a U.S. law should model itself on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or perhaps California's Consumer Privacy Act. While industry didn't like that idea, witnesses did agree that the CCPA should be the floor upon which a federal law is built.

It's clear at this point that the momentum has shifted in favor of federal privacy bill in the U.S. The question is: What will that bill look like, who will sponsor something both the tech community and advocates can live with, and will it actually happen this year? Joseph Jerome, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., has been dead center on the federal privacy bill debate for some time now and took a leading role at the CDT in drafting their own bill. In this episode of the podcast, Jerome discusses the difficulties inherent in trying to pass a bill that pleases everybody. Or at least one that all stakeholders can live with. 

In this episode of the podcast, Mike Shapiro,  chief privacy officer of Santa Clara County talks about whether he thinks this is the year for a federal privacy bill, nudged perhaps by the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. He also discusses building a privacy program from the ground up for an entire county, one that comprises so many different government entities (hospitals, police departments, social services) and with them so many laws and regulations to comply with. Then there's the tension between, as a public servant, spending your time on compliance efforts and delegating some time to data-use for the public good. 

Six months into his new role as commissioner at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Rohit Chopra is still settling into his role, but he knows he has at least two priorities going forward: First, is to bring “more enforcement teeth to everything that we do.” Second, though, follows on from the first: “We have to prove to the public that we’re up to the task. Otherwise that’s a recipe for disaster.” In episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, recorded live at Privacy. Security. Risk 2018, Chopra talks to host Angelique Carson, CIPP/US, about his concerns regarding American isolationism and keeping pace with the rest of the world on data protection and digital rights. “We’re increasingly feeling that other countries, particularly Europe, are in the lead," he said.

When Angelique Carson, CIPP/US, started reporting on privacy in 2010, she was digging for enterprise stories that might matter to a nascent field of privacy professionals. Now, there's so much privacy reporting to do that mainstream media have established "privacy beats" and hired reporters to cover them. Here at the IAPP, we're constantly having to prioritize and reprioritize what to report based on a massive influx of news every day of the week. There's so much news, in fact, we've decided it’s time to launch a second podcast to help all of us digest it. So to launch, “The Privacy Reporters" will cover the biggest privacy stories of the week, discussed by the reporters who are covering them. Carson, joined by the IAPP's Sam Pfeifle as co-host, will chat with reporters based globally to discuss not only the big stories but how they're reported. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Carson and Pfeifle offer a sneak-peek. 

A few years back, Zackary Plotkin was grabbing a coffee, as one does. When he went to swipe his credit card, a chief privacy officer who happened to be standing nearby asked him, "Hey, do you know where that data goes?" Thinking about it for a moment, Plotkin realized: No, he didn't. That began Plotkin's early education into privacy and data protection. An manager at Infinity Consulting Solutions, Plotkin decided he wanted to start helping staff companies working in the privacy space. That was before the General Data Protection Regulation come into play. It took a bit, but business has since picked up. In this episode of the podcast, Plotkin talks about what companies are hiring for and offers tips for pros on the market and looking to get their next gig. 

Ask anyone who frequents Defcon, known as a sort of summer camp for hackers, and they'll tell you the attendee roster at the wildly popular white hat event is overwhelmingly male. Rachel Tobac, chair of the board at Women in Security and Privacy, has been going to Defcon to compete in Social Engineering Capture the Flag for the last three years, and winning. She's gained some notoriety for it, including appearing on this podcast twice before. But noticing she was very much in the minority, she decided she didn't just want to go to Defcon this year, she wanted to bring women in privacy and security with her. An effort that initially saw two women winning sponsorships to attend ended in 57 actually boarding a flight to Vegas. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Tobac tells us how it happened and why it matters. 

Woodrow Hartzog is law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and his research focuses on quote “the complex problems that arise when personal information is collected by powerful new technologies, stored and disclosed online.” In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Hartzog discusses discusses the ways that technologies are designed, at the engineering level, to undermine our privacy. Social media companies, for example, which make money on user data via advertisers, "have every incentive to use the power they have with designers to engineer your almost near-constant disclosure of information," Hartzog says, adding our modern privacy frameworks, which emphasize informed consent, are broken models. "We will be worn down by design, our consent is pre-ordained," he says.