Over the last few years, privacy seems to have been front and center in the news. There is talk of new laws aimed at protecting customers from harm and reports of data breaches and fines being levied upon companies.
People at all levels of business are finding this unsettling, and understandably so. Many company founders are engineers or technologists; they are finding it hard to assess risks related to products that depend on data collection. There are other mid-level engineers in companies who write code and build other automation. They make many smaller decisions, and their technical outcomes, when multiplied by scale, can create shareholder and investor risk. Such tech leaders are right to wonder, “what decisions am I making that may have a privacy impact down the line, just as my strategy is about to bear fruit?”