A Look Ahead to D.C.

It seems like it was just last week that I was shaking hands and greeting the nearly 1,000 privacy professionals who gathered in San Francisco for the Privacy Academy 2007, and here we are, together again, for what is widely regarded as the "must attend"event of the year on the privacy calendar — the IAPP Privacy Summit 2008.

As I write this note, registrations for the Summit are robust, and we are expecting over 1,200 attendees, representing major privacy constituencies from countries across the world. That would make the IAPP Privacy Summit 2008 the largest single gathering of privacy professionals in history — breaking our own record.

Our keynote speakers this year, National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg, and author and George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, are among the foremost authorities on the Supreme Court, and both will discuss the influence of America's highest court on privacy. How have the court's past decisions influenced privacy as we know it, and what can we expect from the Supreme Court as it deliberates on today's most pressing issues?

And while Washington, D.C. will appropriately be the backdrop for an examination of the Supreme Court, our outlook is decidedly global in scope. Representatives and delegations from the U.S., Canada, Central and South America, the European Union nations, and Asia-Pacific countries will be among those coming to hear more than 100 of the sharpest minds in privacy talk about the latest updates in global privacy issues, including important legal and policy developments, trends in behavioral targeting and social networking, data security, professional development and industry-specific issues.

In addition, we will welcome privacy regulators and commissioners from the United Kingdom, France, Bermuda, Israel, Spain, Canada and more, to talk about what is happening in their respective countries as well what they see as influencing privacy across all borders.

And, of course, we've put together a jam-packed agenda that not only includes the best in education and certification, with CIPP, CIPP/G and CIPP/C training and examinations, but also the finest professional networking anywhere in the privacy community. Your networking options will include dinners, plenary luncheons, special receptions, a special "movie night" and "industry pins" so that you can quickly identify colleagues and strike up productive conversation.

There will be KnowledgeLink networking, and we're also facilitating ad hoc networking dinners so that small groups of like-minded privacy pros can take their conversations off-site at the end of the day.

If you have yet to sign up to attend, there's still time to get in on all the action. See you there!

J. Trevor Hughes, CIPP
Executive Director, IAPP