Apple sends CPO to EU privacy conference CEO attended twice

The App Privacy diet

Apple is sending a high-level executive to speak at the EU 2022 Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference (CPDP) in Brussels, Belgium. It is also a conference sponsor of the event. Apple’s CEO has spoken twice there.

And privacy and data protection for all

The company’s Chief Privacy Officer, Jane Horvath, will speak to privacy professionals gathered for the event. It’s not the first time Apple has attended the show, nor is it the first time Horvath has shown up: She hosted a round table discussion in 2021 (below).

Reflecting the importance with which the company regards privacy, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has spoken at the conference twice, once in 2018 and again in 2021.

Last year he warned:

“The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies are purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division. Of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck. Is more present in our lives than it has ever been.

“And it has never been so clear how it degrades our fundamental right to privacy and our social fabric. As I’ve said before, if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.”

You can read complete transcripts of his 2021 speech here. Partial highlights of his earlier appearance are here.

Cook speaks privacy

What is CPDP?

CPDP is a world-leading data protection and privacy conference. It debates at the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic, and technological development in privacy and data protection. Attendees include the world’s academics, lawyers, practitioners, policymakers, industry, and civil society leaders.

Apple continues to lobby for regulators to see some sense and find some compromise to some of the decisions they are making. This inevitably also includes moves to force sideloading on tens of millions of Apple customers who don’t want it.

Who is Jane Horvath?

Horvath is a privacy professional with really extensive experience in the field.

She joined Apple as Senior Director of Global privacy in 2011. She is also a former Global Privacy Counsel at Google and Chief Privacy Counsel and Civil Liberties Officer at the U.S. Department of Justice.

At the DOJ, she was a member of the High Level Contact Group and leader of the U.S. delegation of experts tasked with exploring common ground between the European Union’s Third Pillar data protection principles and U.S. federal privacy laws.

Prior to the DOJ, she was the General Counsel of Digital City Inc., an America Online, Inc. (AOL) subsidiary, and Assistant General Counsel at AOL, where she helped draft the company’s first privacy policies.

You could argue that she has a clue about the issues being raised in this time.

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