The path of privacy

One hundred thousand US schools maintain great volumes and varieties of sensitive information on some 55 million students -- not just names, addresses and Social Security numbers, but also intimate details of a student's life, such as health data, teacher and counselor notes, discipline records and, of course, grades.

The US Department of Education (DoE), the agency charged with establishing and enforcing federal education policies, in April announced a series of initiatives aimed at safeguarding student privacy.

As part of this effort the agency hired its first-ever chief privacy officer (CPO), Kathleen Styles. With just six months on the job, Styles is heading up a new division called Privacy Information and Records Management Services, dedicated to advancing the acceptable collection, use and disclosure of information within the department.

In her role, Styles is working with states and districts to implement privacy precautions, such as minimising the collection of personal information.

Also, she serves as a senior adviser to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the department's privacy, confidentiality and data security policies.

Styles says the agency's increased focus on privacy is necessary to deal with a recent “explosion of information about students” in federal, state and local school systems – thanks, in part, to the digitisation of student data.

Digital records can ultimately be even more secure than those in paper form, she says, but the move to computerise data comes with an entirely new set of privacy challenges that must be managed.

Also contributing to increased privacy demands within the education sector is the establishment of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS).

Such systems, which are grant-funded and currently in place in 41 US states and the District of Columbia, serve as state-wide repositories of student performance and demographic data that can be used to track student progress over time and analyse the effectiveness of school programs.

“The challenge is how to use that information to improve education and increase accountability, while still preserving privacy protections for our children,” Styles says.

Like the Education Department, many organisations have a CPO in place to manage data governance programs, and a core team working on privacy and data protection issues, says Trevor Hughes, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

Privacy is often “extending throughout the enterprise,” Hughes says, with the help of so-called privacy liaisons within various departments, including IT, product development, marketing and HR, who manage some aspect of privacy as part of their overall job responsibilities.

Many experts agree that the alliance between the privacy and security teams is particularly important.

The two disciplines are actually “two sides of the same coin,” as they share the common goal of protecting data from being used inappropriately, Hughes says.

However, there often are nuanced differences between the two professions.

While the stated goal of an information security professional is to protect the confidentiality, availability and integrity of enterprise data, privacy workers aim to ensure data is used in compliance with the law and, perhaps most importantly, consumer expectations.

The field of privacy, says Styles, combines the practical aspect of security with the exercise of answering theoretical questions about the appropriate uses of data.

“I find it to be fascinating,” Styles says. “It's a field I enjoy greatly.” Across the US Federal Government, all agencies have privacy programs, though they exist in various levels of maturity, Styles says.

For instance, not all agencies have a CPO, let alone one with executive-level authority, such as Styles has. At some other agencies, privacy exists within the legal or IT departments, instead of being a standalone office. “An emerging best practice is that privacy is separate,” Styles says.

Next: The rise of a profession

The rise of a profession

Looking back, there have been individuals working on issues related to privacy for decades, says IAPP's Hughes.

In the early 1970s, however, there weren't many pros specifically focused on privacy, besides a handful of lawyers working in government.

At the time, much of this work revolved around the creation of the Privacy Act of 1974, which governs the collection, maintenance, use and dissemination of personally identifiable information maintained by federal agencies.

Within the private sector, the profession began to take hold during the dot-com boom, Hughes says.

“Not until the 90s did we see corporate America recognising the need for specialists in the field of privacy,” he says. At the end of the decade, there were still fewer than 150 privacy professionals in the US, Hughes says.

By 2002, when Hughes came on board as executive director of the IAPP, the organisation had around 500 members. Today, its base has grown to more than 9000 across 70 countries.

“It has been a story of very significant growth year after year, with so many factors feeding into that growth and helping to build the profession,” Hughes says.

An influx of privacy and data security regulations applying to individual business sectors and US states have been largely responsible, experts say. Also driving the profession is the near-light-speed pace of technological innovation.

As a result, new privacy concerns crop up almost daily and are garnering more and more attention from both consumers and policy-makers. The rise of social media, online behavioural advertising, mobile devices and cloud computing, for example, have all raised questions about the proper collection, storage and use of personal data.

Still, the majority of privacy professionals are employed within large organisations, according to the IAPP's 2010 Salary Survey. The poll of nearly 1000 members found that 64 percent of respondents work at organisations with 5000 or more employees.

While large companies in the US are focusing on privacy due to brand concerns and strong enforcement of state and federal regulations, many small organisations are still struggling with such demands, says Andy Serwin, chair of the privacy practice at law firm Foley and Lardner, and executive director of The Lares Institute, a technology and information governance think tank.

Some small businesses don't have a handle on the privacy laws with which they must comply, he says. Others simply do not have sufficient resources necessary to build out a privacy program within their organisation.

Next: Ad evolution

 Ad evolution

Perhaps there is no better person to discuss the evolution of the privacy profession than Jennifer Barrett Glasgow.

That's because she is widely considered to be the first-ever CPO and on the front lines today of an ongoing debate over internet privacy issues.

Two decades ago, Glasgow was tapped to create a privacy program at the marketing services firm Acxiom. At the time, Acxiom had just acquired a data company called InfoBase, which maintained a repository of customer intelligence that was gathered from public records and surveys for marketing purposes.

Now in the market to sell data, company leaders quickly realised they had to learn how to do so appropriately, while also generating revenue.

“It was in 1991 that I was asked to look at this thing called privacy and what it meant to the company,” Glasgow recalls. “I started out thinking it would be a 12- to 18-month project to figure out what we should be doing. And here I am 20 years later, though it's a very different scope and scale.”

Many of the regulations with which the company must currently comply didn't exist even five years ago, she says. For a global firm, navigating the changing regulatory landscape requires a dedicated team of personnel and constant monitoring.

These days, the organisation has a global privacy team of about 15 employees, organised geographically by region, focusing on the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Northern Africa.

The group establishes policies based on regulations, recommendations and industry best practices. It also helps to roll out the policies across its individual lines of business, which are ultimately responsible for maintaining compliance.

The privacy department also functions as an internal auditor, conducting periodic compliance reviews, Glasgow explains. As the company considers acquiring new products, the team conducts impact assessments to ensure compliance with company policy can be achieved.

Besides the growth in federal and state regulations, one of the changes impacting Acxiom's privacy program is the surge of so-called passive data collection, Glasgow says. When browsing the web for products or services, a cookie, or small data file, may be placed on a user's computer to allow advertising firms to silently track the URLs that user visits, as well as the date, time and duration of each visit. This data collection helps advertisers increase the effectiveness of their campaigns by serving consumers ads based on their preferences.

But, it has sparked an intense privacy debate that is currently playing out in Congress. A “do-not-track” bill, introduced in the US Senate in May, would offer web users the option to prevent advertising and marketing companies from collecting information about their web-browsing activities. The Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011, introduced by Senator Jay Rockefeller is widely supported by a number of US privacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Members of the online advertising community, however, argue that such a law would hamper innovation and say the industry's self-regulation of such advertising has been effective to date.

Ultimately, advertising firms, like all companies that collect sensitive information, are obligated to protect consumers' data and consider privacy issues in any new products and services they offer, Glasgow says.

One of the questions privacy professionals must ask themselves is how much data stored on their networks is too much. “There's no-one-size-fits-all answer, but you need to be thinking about that,” she says.