Bridging Privacy Tech Gaps & Fueling the Future of Privacy Tech: Experts
Part 5 of a blog series on the TROPT Defining the Privacy Tech Landscape Whitepaper 2021
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by Lourdes M. Turrecha & Emily Ashley (@emily-ashley), originally published on The Rise of Privacy Tech website on December 12, 2021.
Last month, we at The Rise of Privacy Tech (TROPT) published the TROPT Defining the Privacy Tech Landscape Whitepaper 2021, the foundational whitepaper on the privacy tech landscape. In our first four posts in this series, we broke down key positions on defining privacy tech, categorizing privacy tech, and bridging privacy tech gaps for buyers and users and for founders. In this fifth post, we summarize how we help bridge privacy tech gaps for privacy domain experts.
We surveyed and interviewed privacy domain experts who are involved in the privacy tech space. They cited the following reasons for their interest in the emerging privacy tech landscape: advisory roles, consulting roles, in-house privacy roles, purchase opportunities, and Angel investment opportunities. Most offer direct privacy tech experience, while others cite their experience in building privacy programs, working in relevant industries (B2B, B2C, adtech, etc.) as additional expertise they offer. Privacy domain experts named development of privacy thought leadership and privacy product design as the top challenges with which they can help privacy tech startups.
Several privacy domain experts emphasized the importance of relationships when it comes to deciding whether to work with a privacy tech startup. Privacy domain experts Debra Farber (Principled LLC CEO) and Alexandra Ross (Autodesk Senior Director, Data Protection, Use, and Ethics Senior Counsel) illustrate this recurring emphasis:
One of our key recommendations is for privacy domain experts to get involved in the emerging privacy tech landscape and help build privacy tech solutions. We need more privacy domain experts as privacy tech founders, advisors, operators, and even investors. Why? Because they are intimately familiar with privacy and understand the biggest privacy problems. With privacy domain experts helping build privacy tech, we avoid ineffective privacy tech solutions or, worse, privacy tech vaporware.
Melanie Ensign (Discernible Inc. CEO) underscores this last point on identifying and avoiding privacy tech vaporware:
Join us in fueling privacy tech and innovation
If you want to dig deeper, you can download the full TROPT Defining the Privacy Tech Landscape Whitepaper 2021 here.
If you’d like to join next year’s working group, you can do so by joining TROPT Innovators.
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Lastly, you can join us at our next conference, TROPT Data Privacy Week 2022 by registering here.
