“Do You Have a Strategy for Governance [or] Are You Just Getting Lucky That No One's Catching You Doing Bad Things?”

Silo Busting 43: ESG, Privacy, and Security with Michelle Dennedy and Sam Rehman

“I have always looked at a safe environment as part of what needs to be in a healthy environment,” says Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation.

To which Michelle Dennedy, CEO of PrivacyCode, co-author of The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto, and our latest podcast guest, responds:

I love what you're saying Sam. You want your family, you want your co-workers, you want your life to be safe and secure. Well, the best way to do that of course is to dig a bunker. But if you want them to live and you want your kids to leave the nest and forge out it, it involves risks…. It involves human interaction and learning the skills to be resilient when you're talking to other people who are also not living in their bunkers.

This episode is a fortunate and enlightening meeting of the minds. Dennedy and Rehman talk through what it means to consider privacy and security in the context of ESG.

Dennedy, the former Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco, defines privacy with lawyerly precision as “the authorized processing of personal or personally identifiable information according to moral, ethical, legal, and sustainable principles.”

She encourages board members and CEOs to ask themselves questions such as: “Are we choosing to protect stories, data, artifacts, about the human beings with whom we're interacting, whether they're your employee or your customer?”

Together they talk about the importance of bringing the human factor into ESG conversations.

Says Rehman: “If you look at data just as data—It's a database, it's a file, what do I care, I'm just gonna churn it”—that's not how things are, and you know that. People know that.”

It’s a lively dialogue that swerves into the topic of the emotion of security, and governance in the era of non-stop WFH video conferencing (Dennedy raises the issues this way: “What does it mean to my workforce, if they can work securely anywhere they are? Does that change the character of the data about them that's coming in through all of these channels?”). Listen to discover the many new questions business leaders are asking, what wicked privacy is all about, and more.

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon