Privacy by Design: Data Classification

- May 6, 2013 was a beautiful day. That day, I took my oath as a US citizen. It was a beautiful ceremony. After living in America for almost 13 years, I was finally, officially an American. But before that moving and momentous day, I had to go through a detailed process called naturalization. This process requires filling out multiple forms, providing tons of data about me, my family, and my friends, giving my finger prints, and an interview under oath where every possible question was on the table. During this process, I had to provide extremely personal information, financial, biographical, familial, and saying no was not an option. I did not have the power to question why so much information was necessary to assess my eligibility for citizenship. For example, my maternal grandmother was born in a small village in India and died before my parents even met. The government wanted her birth certificate. Procuring this document was hard, since all those decades ago, the village where she was born did not even issue birth certificates. Throughout this process, I had no visibility into how all my information would be used, who would have access to it, for how long, who it would be shared with, and how it would be protected, if at all. More than seven years later, I still do not. My name is Nishant Bhjaria, and I believe that privacy is about transparency and trust. Whether you're a business or a government, collecting data prudently, sharing it carefully, and protecting it always should be your key guiding principle. I've believed in privacy programs for a long time, and I bring to the table a sensibility that no user should feel as helpless as I did back then. I bring to this course an understanding of how modern companies innovate and the experience of having led privacy programs at some of America's largest businesses.