This is a two-part series that explores the rise of Privacy by Design (PbD) from the basic framework, to its inclusion in the GDPR, to its application in business practices and infrastructure especially in the wake of Artificial Intelligence.

Forbes – “We had the pleasure of sitting down with Ann Cavoukian, former 3-Term Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and currently Distinguished Expert-in-Residence, leading the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada to discuss this massive shift that will upend current business practices. This article includes contributions from Scott Bennet, a colleague researching privacy and GDPR implications on emerging technology and current business practices.

I call myself an anti-marketer, especially these days. My background has predominantly come from database marketing and the contextualization of data to make more informed decisions to effectively sell people more stuff.  The data that I saw, whether it be in banking, loyalty programs, advertising and social platforms – user transactions, digital behavior, interactions, conversations, profiles – were sewn together to create narratives about individuals and groups, their propensities, their intents and their potential risk to the business. While it was an established practice to analyze this information in the way that we did, the benefit was largely to businesses and to the detriment of our customers. How we depicted people was based on the data they created, based on our own assumptions that, in turn, informed the analysis and ultimately, created the rules which governed the data and the decisions. Some of these rules unknowingly were baked in unintended bias from experience and factors that perpetuated claims of a specific cluster or population While for many years I did not question the methods we used to understand and define audiences, it’s clear that business remained largely unchecked, having used this information freely with little accountability and legal consequence…”