Startup CXO

Chapter 132Fractional Chief Privacy Officer

Teresa Troester‐Falk

Although I am an attorney by background, I started my career nearly 20 years ago as a “privacy compliance associate” at DoubleClick, really, at the very beginning of what has become a high‐growth profession. Since then, I've practiced for large global corporations, been a chief global privacy strategist for a leading privacy software company and have worked with leading regulators on privacy and compliance across the world. I began working as a fractional executive about a year ago because the demand for expertise far outweighs the supply of experienced privacy professionals and the risks to companies in not getting privacy and compliance right can be disastrous.

One of the things I've noticed is that when it comes to compliance, I've seen too many companies, especially startup and fast‐growth companies, create a check‐list of do's and don'ts around privacy that inevitably end up on the shelf, or privacy software not being used or not optimized. In the early stages of a company's growth it's usually the IT team that has responsibility for privacy, but the privacy law landscape is constantly changing and the skills needed to keep up are beyond most IT teams. Finding a full‐time privacy officer is out of the reach of a lot of companies since privacy and compliance professionals are in short supply and it's a seller's market.

A fractional privacy officer makes a lot of sense for many companies because that person ...