WASHINGTON — The number of chief privacy officers in the United States will increase into the hundreds of thousands by 2003 compared with the 50-75 CPOs today, the publisher of a leading privacy magazine predicted this week at the Global Privacy Summit 2000.
Alan Westin, publisher of Privacy & American Business, moderated a panel of seven privacy officers, including Tatiana Au, vice president of integrity assurance at America Online; Jules Polonetsky, CPO at DoubleClick; and Richard Purcell, director of corporate privacy at Microsoft Corp. The session was called “The Rise of the Chief Privacy Officer.”
“Say what you do; do what you say,” said Dr. Steven Lucas, chief information officer and CPO at Persona Inc.
This comment was tied into the need to follow the fair information practices of notice, choice, access and security.
When discussing their roles as CPOs, panelists agreed that a big part of their jobs was education.
Privacy officers must educate internal staff, consumers, partners, colleagues and competitors alike, Polonetsky said.
Although panelists asserted that privacy concerns are not new to their organizations, they acknowledged they have become a bigger issue because the Internet has dictated shifts in perspective.
“It's a new idea that consumer information is not a commodotized model,” Purcell said.
