The Privacy Advisor Podcast

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. 

What we know about attorney Jay Edelson to date: He loves beach volleyball so much that he had a court installed at his Chicago law firm so he and his crew could blow off steam. The New York Times refers to him as Silicon Valley's "baby faced boogeyman" for his aggressive court takedowns of tech behemoths. And he's got a very firm grasp on the global privacy and data protection legislative landscape. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Edelson talks about his latest legal pursuits, including a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for alleged violation of biometric privacy law, and another against Kanye West over alleged consumer privacy violations via his music streaming service, Tidal. Edelson also discusses why he thinks the new California Consumer Protection Act is no good. 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the government generally must have a warrant to gather location data from cellphones. The case followed an appeal filed by Timothy Carpenter after he was convicted for a series of armed robberies with help from cellphone data obtained by law enforcement without a warrant. Lawyers representing Carpenter asserted that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, as the lack of a warrant constitutes as an unreasonable search and seizure. The case incited much reaction from both privacy and law enforcement advocates. But now that the dust has settled a bit, what can we take away from the case and how might this change the trajectory of digital surveillance policy in the U.S.? Prof. Orin Kerr of the University of Southern California School of Law and Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union, discuss why the case is so significant and what it could mean for the future of digital surveillance, the third-party doctrine and how the Fourth Amendment applies. Kerr also weighs in on how this the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court might impact Fourth Amendment cases in the future. 

Anyone using the Internet today is surely aware of the viral hate that displays itself everywhere from social media platforms to newspaper comment sections to group chat forums. It's in such forums that marginalized groups face the kind of cyberbullying that surely exists on our streets but seemingly not to the extremes we see when users can hide behind a screen. In this live event, hosted by Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C. to commemorate PRIDE month, Chris Wolf talks to host Angelique Carson, CIPP/US, about strategies to combat viral hate online in the name of protecting those who are especially targeted, including the LGBTQ community. 

In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast's series on robocalls, FTC Attorney Ian Barlow, who's in charge of running the federal do not call list program and bringing cases against illegal robocallers, discusses the FTC's approach to thwarting fraudulent calls. 

If there's one way to describe Alvaro Bedoya besides hard working, it's that he's passionate. Nowhere is that more evident than in his work on the surveillance of minority populations, a passion fueled by Bedoya's time as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. It was during that time that the Snowden revelations hit, and Bedoya was baffled by the ways in which minority populations were being surveilled and the lack of voices speaking up against that. Three years ago, Bedoya, who's now executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, launched a daylong conference called The Color of Surveillance, which brought to the stage activists, scholars and artists from impacted minority populations to discuss the widespread impact government surveillance has had on their communities and what they're doing to combat it. This year's conference, July 19, will focus government surveillance on religious minorities. It's free and open to the public. 

The big day has finally arrived. Years of blood (well, maybe not blood), sweat and tears have culminated in this momentous occasion. So how will things change now? In this episode of the podcast, privacy pros who've been working hard to help companies achieve compliance discuss what their lives will look like on May 26: Will they kick off their shoes? Head to the beach? Is there even time for that, or do we go straight into tucking away and stray hairs and working toward ongoing compliance? Here's what a few of them had to say. 

In parts one and two of this miniseries for The Privacy Advisor Podcast on the plague that is robocalls, host Angelique Carson examined the problem from the U.S. and U.K. perspectives. In short, the U.S. continues to fight an uphill battle, despite levying heavy fines against offenders, while the U.K. has seen a decline in complaints since it started issuing fines. In Hong Kong, a loophole exists in which it is difficult for the Privacy Commissioner for Personal data to enforce. In this part three, PCPD Stephen Wong discusses his approach to helping consumers. 

 So, here we are. We’re in that final push to May 25 when the GDPR comes into force. I have to admit to you that I actually, at this point, would love to never use the acronym GDPR ever again. I feel like we’ve written so many stories here at the IAPP and done so many podcasts on the topic that, like you, I’m a little GDPR burned out.

But I first interviewed Chris Zoladz, of Navigate, a consulting firm, in February of 2017, to get a feel for the kinds of questions privacy pros were coming to him with in their GDPR prep and to hopefully give you guys a feel for whether your progress on it was tracking with your peers. It’s our highest rated podcast to date in terms of listens, so, it was clearly something that resonated.

Given that, I interviewed him again in August 2017 for an update on how things were going, so it only felt right that, given we’re in this final stretch before deadline, I should interview him again to get a sense for the finish.

Obviously May 25 isn’t Y2k, and compliance is an ongoing process, as Zoladz will talk about in this episode. But nonetheless, it’s a big date in our profession. So here, Zoladz and I will talk about what folks should be focusing on if they’re scrambling now, and what things look like from a compliance standpoint moving past this historic date.