This September, the IAPP is holding a Young Privacy Professionals event during their Privacy Academy in San Jose. I was given the opportunity to assist in putting this event together, and believe it will be a great way to meet other young privacy professionals. Most importantly, it shows an investment in the future of privacy.
Whether we know it or not, people who are in their twenties and early thirties grew up in an era of ludicrous technological evolution. As an example, the storage of data has been changed and also grown exponentially. I started off with 3.5 inch floppy disks, in high school I was shown a flash drive about the size of a large pen with a whopping 64 megabytes of memory. Now I have a flash drive with more memory than my first computer had, and it is about the size of a single button on my keyboard.
Not only this, but social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and more never existed in the 80s or 90s. Where our parents may remember the Sears Catalogue as the best way to buy things, we now have Amazon.com. Most importantly, our information is more exposed than ever. People used to worry about thieves going through their mail, stealing information that way, but now they can do it without ever stepping within a hundred miles of you. Privacy is more important to every person now than it was when we grew up.
Privacy is more important to people today than in the past. “Don’t talk to strangers” is now “Don’t answer strange emails,” particularly those from a Nigerian Prince. Growing up, with the advent of the internet, identity theft and non-trustworthy websites were a major concern. Perhaps this is why Privacy is so important to myself and other individuals of my generation.
The IAPP Privacy Academy is from September 17th to the 19th. Will you be there?