Introducing PrivacyCode!
A SaaS Platform for Privacy Management is Finally Here
The way we work, move around the globe, entertain, educate and affect social change is fueled by a ubiquitous flow of data and data-driven products.
At the same time, we see fault lines forming between safety and individual autonomy; convenience and choice; ethics and urgency. The systems of law and international sovereignty can scarcely keep pace with technological change and the demands of new generations of digital natives who are hungry to have their digital cake and eat it, too.
This complex, ever changing, multi-stakeholder and high-risk world is the realm of the Chief Privacy Officer. She is tasked with understanding individual employee and consumer rights, international legal regimes, technical capabilities and the financial realities required to drive the entire soft system that is data protection and privacy. It’s a lot.
Reimagining Privacy for the Modern Enterprise
When we talk to people who work in privacy – from CPOs to privacy engineers - we hear stories of communication failures, confusing product requirements, and ever-increasing pressure from regulators and board members to reduce the risk of collecting, managing and securing personal data. Often, we find ourselves vigorously nodding in agreement. That’s because we’ve both “sat in the chair,” leading privacy programs from the legal and technical sides. The pain points we hear are deeply familiar to us.
We’ve stared into the void – and it is a void – searching for an enterprise solution to connect policy words, technology, law, reporting and governance. We searched for a platform that legal, technical and business teams understand and could actually use to build privacy into products and governance programs. For too long, the void stared back at us.
So we decided to fill the void (and then some) – by building a proactive, metrics creating platform that meets developers and privacy leaders where they are. Specifically, a solution that enables privacy teams to leverage the best ML/AI solutions to test assumptions and make standards-based recommendations. And, to equip them to scale their work by having the most current regulatory standards at their fingertips. We wanted them to be able to break down complex requirements into intelligible chunks so that the right person can execute on them quickly and effectively. We believe privacy leaders and teams should be able to do all of this, and more. So that’s what we built: a platform to empower privacy experts to become more efficient, and for privacy novices to perform like experts.
Why PrivacyCode?
PrivacyCode is the only SaaS platform that brings scale, efficiency, and accountability to privacy programs. Today, there is a chasm between the privacy teams who use words to create privacy policies and developers who use code to transform these policies into products. Simply put, they speak different languages.
For decades these two essential stakeholders (and others across the enterprise who “own” aspects of privacy) have found themselves in endless meetings, struggling to create system requirements from legal documents, only to end up frustrated. Correcting these requirements after systems are deployed or updated can be costly, time consuming, and failure prone. The cost of this inefficiency and miscommunication is real. Last year, Didi Global was hit with a breathtaking $1.2 billion fine, Sephora was fined $1.2m for breaking California’s privacy law, Weight Watchers suffered bloated liabilities from poor acquisition practices because the startup failed to build privacy in to protect children’s data. The list goes on.
To address these growing risks and build a solution that would scale and iterate as the privacy landscape continues to change, we focused on building the PrivacyCode platform that is:
Cloud-based and collaborative
One-source of truth and proof
Developer and privacy team friendly
Engineered for the ethics of the modern enterprise
In essence, these principles are the “code” that we use to guide us. In the process, we’ve created new ways to advance how people work with privacy, day to day. For instance:
The Privacy Object TM Library provides out of the box instructions and translates privacy policies into consumable tasks for developers and project managers
Machine Learning (ML) engine enables speed, automation and scale
Embedded tools capture data, drive analytics, and generate reporting
There’s a lot more to know about what PrivacyCode can do – contact us for a demo.
We also think it’s important to say what PrivacyCode is not. Our solution is not a checklist. It’s not an assessment framework or data mapping tool. These are point solutions that only look at a piece of the privacy puzzle without connecting it to the larger privacy program, technical requirements, or reporting imperatives.
Why a Platform?
Privacy programs today must scale. One-off, siloed projects in legal departments or technology teams, or in separate business functions fail to leverage previous knowledge and development work, and almost always result in costly gaps and lost productivity. And without an integrated workflow and view, it’s almost impossible for privacy leaders to provide metrics and demonstrate the progress of their program. This “proof gap” is something that plagues many privacy professionals.
What’s more, privacy is no longer the purview of a single person, be it a lawyer, privacy manager or a cybersecurity expert with “privacy” as a side job. Now, privacy touches all parts of an enterprise, from sales to marketing to supply chain to HR to IT. A comprehensive solution that enables each of these stakeholders to contribute to, and track a privacy program from their POV , is essential. PrivacyCode as a platform is the “spine” that connects the unique elements and various user personas of enterprise privacy into a single, simple to use system.
Why Now?
Businesses are responsible for managing an avalanche of proprietary data. Yet the privacy protection “industry” is still in its infancy. As the ownership of privacy within large enterprises continues to shift from legal teams to a shared responsibility across teams and work streams – many who are new in the field - keeping track of the work and the evidence is critical. Toss in the explosion of remote work, complex governance, growing cyber threats, and enterprise customers who want to know if a company can prove it protects customer data, and it becomes clear that continuing to manage privacy like it’s 2010 is a massive risk.
In concert with a shifting privacy management landscape, C-suites and Boards of Directors are paying closer attention to what they spend on their privacy program and want evidence that risks are being managed efficiently. Successful and sustainable businesses know that it’s critical to protect data, and act as its guardian and manage it as an asset.
Where Are We Headed?
We’re pretty excited about what we’ve built with PrivacyCode. We uniquely understand the challenges facing privacy leaders and privacy engineers today and making their work easier – and protecting the private data of all people – is a mission we truly believe in. We also love the fact that our platform is a business enabler for our customers and creates real value for the enterprises that use our platform.
As the data privacy solutions market is poised for hypergrowth, we’re confident that PrivacyCode will be at the forefront of privacy innovation for a long time to come. If you’d like to join us on our journey by becoming a PrivacyCode Design Partner to see firsthand how you can reduce privacy risk and accelerate teams across your enterprise, please contact us.
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About the Founders
PrivacyCode was founded by industry pioneers Michelle Finneran Dennedy and Kristy Edwards.
Michelle wrote the book on Privacy Engineering; she has held Chief Privacy Officer roles at Cisco, McAfee/Intel, and Sun Microsystems, and is former CEO of Drumwave. Kristy is an entrepreneur, patent holder, and seasoned Product leader who builds privacy-enabled products that customers love; she’s led global Privacy and Information Security teams at Oracle, Workday, McKesson and Lookout. Both founders are thought leaders and data privacy innovators.
