Haven’t been to Infobip Shift Conference  yet? We’re flipping the script and bringing it to you! Join us for the first Infobip Shift meetup in Las Vegas on December 1st!

The Shift team wants to meet more local developer communities, so we’re going on the road across Northern America. So far the Shift team was in Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and recently Los Angeles – the next stop is Las Vegas.

The first speaker at the Las Vegas meetup is Sean Falconer, Head of Developer Relations & Product Marketing at Skyflow. He is going to talk about why data privacy is problematic and why our current patchwork solutions continue to fail:

Attendees will get the context for why companies, even super well-funded ones, continue to struggle with data privacy and how a data privacy vault can alleviate these struggles.

“…customer data needs to be handled with more care and treated differently than a click on a webpage.”

There are a couple of reasons why data privacy is hard for companies, Sean points out. The first is that historically, going back to the first widespread use of office software in the 1980s, we’ve treated all data the same. A customer record is stored in the exact location and treated with the same level of sensitivity as any other application data. This is a false assumption:

Just as you likely keep your passport somewhere safe and handle it with more care than your batteries, customer data needs to be dealt with more care and treated differently than a click on a webpage.

We’ve failed to recognize that customer data fundamentally differs from regular application data. Now it is replicated, copied, and fragmented everywhere within our infrastructure. In the 1980s, in a disconnected on-prem world, that wasn’t a big deal. With hugely scaled applications serving millions or even billions of users with thousands of data sources, this becomes a big big problem. Today companies don’t know where their customer data is:

This makes it impossible for them to answer basic questions, like what data we are storing and where it is stored. Compliance is easy and data security is possible if you know where it is. 

Is there any hope of doing data privacy correctly?

Even if a company decides or is forced to prioritize data privacy, at this point, with these vast scaled systems where they’ve lost track of where things are, it’s an intractable problem, Sean explains.

They reactively attempt to stitch together different point solutions to plug holes in the problem, but putting a bandaid over a broken limb doesn’t make it less broken. Nonetheless, there is some hope in companies like Netflix, Google, and Apple that have pioneered a technology known as a zero trust PII data privacy vault:

A data privacy vault is a radically different and straightforward approach to solving these common data privacy problems.

As an industry, we need to recognize that privacy is a fundamental human right and that our engineers and entrepreneurs are responsible for doing right by our customers and prioritize protecting their data, Sean concludes. We need to solve this problem not by stitching together point solutions over an existing system:

We need to take a first principles architectural approach to the problem, shifting privacy left and making it an engineering problem, not about marking off a list of compliance requirements.

Alongside Sean, Infobip’s Chief Developer Experience Officer and Founder of Infobip Shift Conference Ivan Burazin will take the stage. He will talk about Developer Awareness Experiments. With everyone in a constant attention deficit, creating awareness in the developer community is becoming harder, especially at scale and within a now constrained budget:

So with that in mind, we conducted a few creative experiments to see what would happen. In this talk, we walk through one of them.

Join us in Las Vegas on December 1st and learn more about data privacy!