When you hear that someone is a “privacy professional”, you know two things about them:
1. That they work in the field of privacy
2. That someone pays them to do that
So ask:
Who is paying you?
Based on the answer, you’ll know whether their job is to protect your privacy or to find ways of legitimising their employer’s business model that’s predicated on violating your privacy.
Also, ask yourself: who has the most money? And you’ll know who can afford to hire the most “privacy professionals.” Hint: trillion-dollar corporations are called trillion-dollar corporations for a reason.
(Wait a minute, am I really saying that most “privacy professionals” are hired to help corporations to violate your privacy. That’s a yes.)
Finally, have a little read up on “revolving doors” to understand that for some of these “privacy professionals”, a job is just a job and they will happily flip between the two because, really, it’s all just a game to some people when you have a certain level of privilege.
I was once censured by the Nordic Privacy Arena – where I was presenting a keynote and which “aims to be part of the privacy professional’s journey” – for criticising the keynote by the Facebook employee (a lawyer who was a “privacy professional”). What was that Facebook employee’s previous job, you ask? Oh, he worked at the French data protection office (CNIL). And that, kids, is what we call a revolving door.
(Last year, Nordic Privacy Arena had four speakers from Google as well as a speaker from Capgemini – whose US subsidiary has a contract to provide surveillance and tracking services to ICE* – and Salesforce**. Not to mention a representative from the Irish Data Protection Commission. You know, the folks who enforce GDPR to the extent that they’re sued by @noybeu to do so. If you don’t know how corrupt Ireland is on this, read the excerpt from the Facebook whistleblowers book, Careless People, I have in this post: https://ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-people/)
* https://www.surveillancewatch.io/entities/capgemini
** https://dpforum.se/nordic-privacy-arena/nordic-privacy-arena-2026/
#CPDP2026 #CPDP #NordicPrivacyArena #dataProtection #privacyWashing #institutionalCorruption #revolvingDoors #usefulIdiots #privacy #humanRights #GDPR
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