1 Privacy engineering: why your business needs it and how to scale it

Over the last few years, privacy seems to be front and center in the news. There is talk of new laws aimed at protecting customers from harm, and news reports of data breaches and fines levied upon companies.

Engineering leaders are finding this unsettling, and understandably so. Many founders are engineers or technologists. They are finding it hard to assess risks in how they can devise products that depend on data collection. There are other engineers - who write code and build other automation - mid-stream in the company who make several small decisions. These decisions, and their technical outcomes, when multiplied by scale, can create shareholder risk as well as 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?

1.1       What is privacy?

1.2       How data flows into and within your company

1.3       Why Privacy Matters

1.3.1   The Fines are Real

1.3.2   When early-stage efficiency wins cause late-stage privacy headaches

1.3.3   Privacy investigations could be more than a speedbump

1.3.4   Privacy process can unlock business opportunities: a real-life example

1.4       How privacy affects your business at a macro level

1.4.1   Privacy and Safety: the COVID edition

1.4.2   Privacy and Regulations: A cyclical process

1.5       Privacy Tech and Tooling: Your options and your choices

1.5.1   The “Build vs. Buy” question

1.5.2   3rd party privacy tools - do they really work and scale?

1.6       What this book will not do

1.7       How the role of engineers has changed, and how that has affected privacy

1.8       Summary