How do you believe the COVID-19 pandemic will further impact the privacy specialists’ activity?

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has brought tremendous challenges to our day-to-day lives. Privacy professionals made a lot of efforts to balance privacy and protection. And it looks that their hard work will be required in 2021 as well. We wanted to know how privacy specialists believe that their work will be further impacted by COVID-19 and this is what we found out. 

Cristiana Deca, privacy expert, thinks “We will have a lot of work to do, first because companies are forced to go digital and most of them will probably never go back to the old ways, and second because this transformation means changing business processes and integrating new tools and all of this impacts the privacy team”. 

“If I would have to name one main activity for the next year, I would say privacy education, training staff about the new reality and the privacy risks involved”, added Cristiana Deca. 

Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, Senior Counsel for Global Privacy, says: “I think privacy professionals will have to continue working hard on keeping that difficult balance between the need for effective data-based measures necessary for a safe return to work, return to classrooms, to entertainment and sports venues and ensuring there are still privacy, dignity, freedom”.

According to Tudor Galos, Privacy consultant, “We still do not understand the full level of COVID-19 pandemic impact into economy, work environment and privacy. As Gary Vee said during a Web Summit session, "this is above my pay grade". Let me give you an example: everybody said that contact tracing applications will help eradicate this pandemic, however due to privacy issues and lack of interest the adoption was very low. We all expected data protection supervisory authorities to intervene in malicious business practices such as intrusive employee monitoring, but almost nothing happened. Basically, we are shooting in the dark, but still, we can expect companies to continue moving to hybrid work environments (office and work from home) so they will be in need of business continuity plans, new security policies and procedures, privacy impact assessments etc”.

Related articles:

• 2020. A short retrospective from a data privacy perspective (1)
• 2020. Which was the biggest challenge for the privacy professionals during this year? (2)

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