Serious Privacy

Send us Fan Mail We look back to January 2020 - with no crystal ball for Serious Privacy with Paul Breitbarth and K Royal .  With 47 episodes and over 25,000 downloads,  Season 1 of Serious Privacy is complete. Thank you to our fans! Season 2 starts Global Privacy Day 2021. Our initial ideas were a little different , but K and Paul found their rhythm and a following. Join us as we look back, play...

Send us Fan Mail On 17 November 2020, the Canadian Minister of Information Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, introduced bill C-11, the long-awaited update to the federal Canadian privacy legislation. For many years, this legislative update had been rumoured, and now that it was finally put on the table, we can see some sweeping changes. The Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2020,...

Send us Fan Mail Since the Schrems-II judgment came down on July 16th, the message has slowly sunk in that Europe is serious about looking at privacy and data protection through the glasses of fundamental rights protection. That was even reinforced by the Privacy International and Quadrature du Net cases , published at the start of October. Any interference with the fundamental rights to privacy a...

Send us Fan Mail Technology brings new demands for compliance, especially given the amount of personal data collected through various means and how it is both used and combined. However, technology can also be used to assist compliance professionals by providing the necessary information quickly.  In most of the Serious Privacy  episodes, co-hosts Paul Breibarth and K Royal have discussed one or m...

Send us Fan Mail Live! (okay recorded with a live studio audience) from our offices at a fabulous virtual conference - the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society , discussing Public Interest Technologies in a four day long global online conference. This is a first for Serious Privacy, recording an episode live as part of the conference presentation. In normal times, this confe...

Send us Fan Mail In just a single week, so much has happened. The California Privacy Rights Act was passed by voters and will come into effect on 1 January 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union once again confirmed that consent is not valid when relying upon pre-ticked boxes, and the European Data Protection Board issued its Recommendations on international data transfers in the wake of...

Send us Fan Mail This past week, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) adopted it’s Recommendations on international data transfers post Schrems-II and the European Commission released the long-awaited draft of new standard contractual clauses . At the same time, the EDPB adopted an updated version of their earlier guidelines on the European Essential Guarantees : criteria that a third country...

Send us Fan Mail Privacy and data protection are not just a job for lawyers or professionals who specialize in privacy - not anymore. Technology plays an important role in ensuring personal data can remain private. Ensuring that personal data is secure but useful requires a level of skill found in data scientists. In this episode of Serious Privacy , Paul Breitbarth and K Royal searched for just s...

Send us Fan Mail Election day in the United States is quite the dramatic event in 2020. We may soon know who will be the President of the United States in the coming years, what the new U.S. Congress will look like, if there might be a chance of federal privacy legislation and an EU-U.S. adequacy deal passing in the coming years,  and if California Proposition 24 (the California Privacy Rights Act...

Send us Fan Mail Technology around the world changes quickly - fast and furiously. Unique companies solving problems we did not realize we had are hitting the market. For example, the development of always connected mobile devices has fundamentally changed the global banking system. Where before in many parts of the world people were devoid of having a bank account, nowadays a smartphone gives the...

Send us Fan Mail Putting the evils back in Pandora’s box just doesn’t seem possible - much like reclaiming privacy in today’s datacentric world. This week, Paul Breitbarth and K Royal hosted Rob Shavell, CEO and founder of Abine (rhymes with hey mine) to discuss consumer privacy controls related to online privacy. Just over a decade ago, the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) started the development...

Send us Fan Mail Events happen occasionally that reinforce each other in such a way that the sum of things is worse than you could ever have imagined: a perfect storm. You may very well say that 2020 is a perfect storm in itself. And who knows what November and December may bring. This week, Paul Breitbarth and K Royal invited Stuart N. Brotman , author of Privacy's Perfect Storm: Digital Pol...

Send us Fan Mail Wicked problems are those without simple answers. They are thorny, complex, multi-faceted issues. This episode of Serious Privacy by Paul Breitbarth and K Royal was pre-billed on social media as “talking anarchy” and “Serious Privacy-ing.”  In this episode, guests include Uber CPO and frustrated comedian Ruby Zefo , Godmother of Privacy Engineering Michelle Dennedy , and TrustArc’...

Send us Fan Mail If 2020 was not bad enough already, we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 , 2020. She was admired by many lawyers and legal scholars, not just in the United States - she was a legal giant, and a great advocate for equality for all. Paul Breitbarth and K Royal discuss the impact Justice Ginsburg had on the legal field and how she inspired respect and devotion.  Our homage goe...

Send us Fan Mail 2020 is the gift that keeps on giving. In this episode, Paul Breitbarth and K Royal revisit some of the issues discussed on previous episodes, but with a guest who has a unique global perspective. Our guest today is an American in Brussels. He is the Deputy Chief Privacy Officer of the US-based pharmaceutical company Merck . Chris Foreman has practiced law in London, Washington DC...

Send us Fan Mail This past week in privacy law saw several unexpected developments. When this podcast started back in January, the intention was to record a series of conversations between K Royal and Paul Breitbarth with an occasional guest or recorded conference panel discussion. They would discuss what had happened in a week, place privacy and data protection developments around the world in co...

Send us Fan Mail Privacy professionals as cosplayers - maintaining a sense of identity away from the hectic life of a privacy professional or managing stress in a healthy direction?  In this episode of Serious Privacy, we move away a little from data protection and over to the broader right of privacy. The right to be left alone, or the right to ensure you can be whoever you want to be, without yo...

Send us Fan Mail Privacy is the hottest new job market for attorneys and non-attorneys. Even more so when you consider the full range of data protection jobs. A few weeks ago, we spoke to Jared Coseglia with TRU STaffing about recruiting for functions in privacy. In this episode we look at the other side. What is it like for someone to get started in privacy, not by sheer coincidence like K Royal...

Send us Fan Mail Now this story is all about how our lives got flipped - turned upside down. We’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, we’ll tell you all about the privacy laws down there. Today, we are traveling virtually to the sixth largest country in land area and in its honor, we are flipping parts of the show. We are upside down, since we are going Down Under. Since the beginning of...

Send us Fan Mail With all the recent changes in privacy laws, it seems like a whole new world. Or perhaps not. In this episode, we connect with Travis LeBlanc , a well-seasoned professional with insight into government actions to discuss recent privacy developments through the lens of past actions. He was the chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Enforcement Bureau in the Obama ye...

Send us Fan Mail The privacy job market is booming! Chief Privacy Officer, Data Protection Officer, Chief Data Officer, Privacy Engineer, GDPR Expert, CCPA Consultant, Data Privacy Counsel, Privacy Risk Officer… And this is just to get started. Do a vacancy search with the word ‘Privacy’ on LinkedIn or most job-search boards and you will be shown a huge variety of functions around the world for ne...

Send us Fan Mail Privacy is not a luxury, yet marginalized populations are more scrutinized and adversely impacted. How do we build equality into the data and practices on using data? It is no surprise that in today’s day and age, data is ubiquitous. Every step we take is documented by multiple devices, from our smartphones and smart watches to street cameras, allowing for massive data sets to be...

Send us Fan Mail Privacy is like driving a car - lots of rules which change across borders and you need to look both ways before crossing the street. In both the US and EU, the Schrems-II decision on 16 July is a major development in data protection navigation. But we are just at the beginning of understanding all the consequences of the verdict of the EU Court of Justice . Don’t worry - also in t...

Send us Fan Mail The Schrems II decision is a Serious Privacy topic. Privacy professionals in the EU and the US had the 16th of July marked on their calendars for a long time. Today was the day the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union would publish their verdict in the case between the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on the one hand, and Facebook and Max Schrems on the ot...

Send us Fan Mail The world of privacy seems to be both growing and becoming smaller as privacy professionals around the world are grappling with similar issues amidst an increasing amount of regulation and enforcement. What are the hot topics on the minds of these privacy professionals? In this episode of Serious Privacy,  we issued an open invite to guests, welcomed a guest host Ralph O’Brien , ...