With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) going into effect on January 1, 2020, I think it’s timely to look at how digital natives may change the way we view data privacy altogether. If you were a toddler when Voyager 1 and 2 buzzed Saturn in 1980 and 1981 respectively, you are a digital native, as is anyone who came along after you. Maybe you started high school when email and file-sharing started going mainstream, and by the time you graduated, The New York Times had a homepage, at least one of your parents was likely online, and we, consumers at large, were beginning to experience...

Tricia Griffith, CEO of Progressive, the large insurance provider, said: “With the right people, culture, and values, you can accomplish great things.” [1] Several excellent analogies can be used to describe the global challenge we face in cyberspace. We can describe it as modern piracy, given the history of piracy impacting so many people while it was rampant, its criminal nature, and its use in proxy wars between the great naval powers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It could be thought of as similar to infectious disease, given how often software viruses are proximate to fraud and...

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”The value proposition for data is not in its protection (sentence), but in its use (verdict).In this series of articles, we’re going to explore an alternate value proposition for data classification and the benefits of thinking of data classification primarily as an enabler for using data rather than protecting data. In this first article, we’ll consider the fundamental reason that we want to classify data with this mindset. In the second article,...