Welcome to the New World of Corporate Privacy

Privacy is clearly an effervescent legal domain right now. I found an article which tells the story of the creation of privacy departments in big corporations. And it seems this is only the beginning.

When General Electric Co. was getting ready to launch a home energy-monitoring appliance last year, it called in an unusual expert: the company’s chief privacy leader, Nuala O’Connor Kelly.

Ms. Kelly quizzed the product developers on how they planned to use the data collected by the device and advised them on what to write in the appliance’s “energy data privacy policy” for consumers.

Welcome to the new world of corporate privacy.

For years, companies have conducted environmental-impact assessments to determine the effect of prospective construction projects and operations. Now, many leading companies are conducting privacy-impact assessments before launching products and services.

The goal of these assessments: avoid running into regulatory fire in the complicated landscape of privacy law. Global companies have to manage privacy laws that differ by country—and by state in the U.S. And the stakes are getting higher, as regulators world-wide are increasingly cracking down on privacy violations.

Read the whole article HERE.