Chief Technology Officer
2 June 2020 (Paris, France) – As we noted during our coverage of the International Cybersecurity Forum this past January, privacy and those who make a career from it were thriving prior to COVID-19. The job market and job security for highly trained professionals within the space were on the upswing as privacy made its ascension to being a mainstream topic.
There were some initial thoughts and concerns that, like most industries, privacy and its professionals would feel the adverse effects of the pandemic in the way of layoffs and other budget-cutting measures. Those feelings came to light after it was revealed many were laid off as the pandemic was only just coming into focus, and as the California Privacy Rights Act ballot initiative, several federal privacy legislation initiatives and even the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation were all seeing a very different landscape.
But suddenly … a change. Recent studies from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAP) and other data professional organisations suggest privacy has been resilient and strong through these challenging times. A recent survey by the IAPP showed that 85% of their privacy professional membership expect no, or limited, reduction to their budgets during the pandemic.
Surprised? Well, keep in mind that as a result of COVID-19 :
• Employers everywhere want to monitor the health of their employees for COVID-19 symptoms and this means sensitive data collection issues so they need help to navigate around restrictions and/or find exceptions to data privacy rules to get that done.
• As more and more companies are adopting the 50% rule … distributed teams working outside the office comprising 1/2 of a company’s work force … it means heavy remote cyber security monitoring and employee productivity monitoring risks.
• As we’re all more reliant on social networking to stay in touch with loved ones and friends, and on digital media to keep us entertained, there will be a wealth of online privacy issues.
• Businesses are increasingly reliant on online sales (and many are new to it) so while we’re on lockdown or semi-lockdown there are more efforts put into online targeting and e-marketing.
In Europe it has taken an interesting turn as European privacy professionals note they are facing a very different landscape with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Many see a potential rough patch for EU privacy in the wake of the pandemic because the health emergency must trump normal privacy concerns. In dealing with the pandemic, it’s been demonstrated that privacy impacts all of our lives, both personally and professionally, across the spectrum. But the need for personal health devices and contact tracing tools and more personalized scenarios means that privacy compliance is going to need to bend a little.
Back in the U.S., privacy professionals say the pandemic has done little in the way of hindering efforts to comply with regulations. But while working on the California Consumer Privacy Act compliance while keeping tabs on the California Privacy Rights Act ballot initiative, and Congressional Republicans and Democrats exploring COVID-19-related federal privacy legislation that will likely require more compliance work, there is a sense “there’s a little bit of sleeping on the value of privacy and data strategy in general right now”.
And other commercial entities are seeking to hire data privacy professionals, too. There has been a huge uptick in demand for jobs and candidates for industries that are using and holding more personal information than ever before, especially the digital streaming companies like Netflix and Disney. Anything digital is full steam ahead. Businesses in the business-to-consumer space are all doing extremely well. Jay Plotkin, a long-time friend who runs Infinity Solutions, a media recruiting agency in Los Angeles (full disclosure: we post his recruitment positions on our media job site) told me “this virus has forced people to realize what they didn’t see, what they didn’t know, what they did not have. We’re scouring government regulator sites and Linkedin to find data privacy professionals. There is a multitude of different ways these people can be used, and for a hell of a lot more money than the government will pay. It’s easy to guess where the opportunities are.”
NOTE: the same is happening in Europe. As our founder, Gregory Bufithis, noted in his piece marking the second birthday of the GDPR “many experienced data protection employees have left regulators either out of frustration and/or better pay at corporates, so you have a flood of newcomers coming into the regulators with little experience with privacy.”
We’ve been here before. There will be a steady climb for six months to a year before we see a boom. From a privacy perspective, we’re going to see a lot of data slipups with companies being less detail-oriented and running in a panic during that span. The same thing happened in 2008-2009 after the economic shutdown. You see a massive push for an increase in types of jobs after things like fraud and breaches come about. What fun to come.
