Our businesses depend on our relationships with our prospects, customers and clients for their very existence; and therefore respect for the data protection and privacy rights of those individuals is of fundamental importance.

When it comes to privacy and data protection compliance the principles are the same; you need to understand what really matters and go all-in on that.  It’s the difference between the false sense of security that comes from doing the wrong things efficiently and getting the important stuff done effectively.

Whatever about how that interaction between public and private plays out in our lives, privacy means that the choice is a personal one for each of us to make.

What though of our daily interactions? It is likely that many of them are made not with people but with, or via, devices, or through the internet of things.

Leaving records, that form data.  Data that can be amassed and form great value; though not to us, unlike the valuable memories I have of those daily trips with my grandfather.

When we chose free, what we didn’t realise is that this incentivised the creation of a new business model. One in which the most valuable assets were personal data and privacy, which were often inadvertently traded without really appreciating or understanding the implications.

What if we transformed how we marketed our businesses from something that sees compliance as a nuisance to something that places respect in our customers?

That data that we always felt it was safer to have rather than not may actually represent a serious liability; should we be holding it at all? 

Unusually for a lawyer, I came to data protection and privacy via marketing.

One of my first jobs was working for my aunt Margot in a little hotel she and her husband Colm ran in Dublin when I was a teenager.