Are we living "The Truman Show"? I had a chat with Mads Flensted Hauge, Chairman of DAMA Denmark and DPO and Data Governance Manager at a Danish health care provider.
We looked at Data Privacy from four different perspectives:
The society perspective
- What is data privacy and why is it important?
- How transparent are we as citizens?
- What considerations need to take place when we talk about data sharing across public agencies?
The company perspective
- Why should we care about privacy in our company? Are we just talking about compliance?
- Where should the DPO role be places in a company?
- Does your HR system need a feature to show your employees home on google maps?
The data worker perspective
- What does this mean for us data workers in how we treat data?
- What does privacy by design mean?
- What is the impact of AI, ML,… on privacy?
The personal perspective
- What can I do to keep my personal data save?
- How many smart devices do I need in my home? Can I live without a washing machine with Wi-Fi connection?
- Has the corona pandemic made it even more ok to share private heath data?
Here are my key takeaways:
- Convenience drives change and digitalization in public sector - and sometimes privacy becomes the victim for efficiency.
- To apply GDPR you need to apply different knowledge areas of Data Management. That is why these two are closely combined.
- It has always been hard to show the value of a data management journey from the start, but with GDPR and the ominous notion of fines, data management got the ear of the C-level.
- Since GDPR is framed as compliance, it leads companies to do just the bare minimum to be compliant.
- GDPR forces you to get a deeper knowledge about your business.
- There is an ethics dimension to data privacy, and DPOs are on the forefront to instigate this ethics site.
- A DPO does not just write policies and procedures but must navigate company culture to promote ethics and privacy actively.