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Michelle Cohen Quoted from Panel Appearance at IAPP’s Privacy Conference in DC

Quoted
Nov 19, 2015

Michelle Cohen Quoted from Panel Appearance at IAPP’s Privacy Conference in DC

Chief marketing officers and chief privacy officers have very different ways of looking at the world.

“Are there any marketing folks in the room?” asked security professional Aubrey Turner, addressing roughly 50 privacy pros at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

No hands went up.

“Good – because I’m going to pick on them for a minute,” said Turner, who serves as director of strategic solutions for identity access management at Optiv Security, a cybersecurity solutions provider.

The tension derives from opposed priorities around data collection, access, management and use…

Despite the perception that compliance is tedious or inhibits creativity or innovation in some way, it’s always better than having to mount a defense, said Michelle Cohen, a privacy lawyer at Ifrah Law LLC.

“My goal is to keep the client outside of litigation,” said Cohen, who joked that before being introduced to a client’s new CMO a while back, she was told by her client to “scare him.”

Because litigation is avoidable. “The way to do [it] is to have a fulsome consent policy, even though the marketing folks may not be all that excited about it,” Cohen said.

Although Cohen was referring in that instance to compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the federal statute that limits robocalling and the use of autodialers, it’s a sentiment that rings true across the board.


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