How A Company’s Philosophy To ‘Shift Left’ Is Making Headway In The Data Privacy World.

While data privacy continues to propagate daily headlines from breaches to new laws, many in the business world are wrestling with how to design a vigorous and thoughtful privacy program without bogging down the necessary speed of the software development life cycle.

Additionally, enterprises are learning firsthand the bottom-line value of maintaining and increasing overall customer trust and privacy is at the center of the conversation. According to a recent report from Forrester, post-pandemic, reduced tech dependency will combine with trust and privacy issues — including an inability to protect users from emerging risks and a lack of effective ethical measures in digital environments — to progressively erode consumers’ trust. We predict that by the end of 2023, consumers’ trust in tech companies will shrink 15%.

I recently had a chance to sit down with data privacy expert and TerraTrue co-founder and CEO, Jad Boutros, to discuss why he started the company, the changing privacy landscape, and where it’s headed next.

Gary Drenik: Tell me about your background and what motivated you to start TerraTrue.

Jad Boutros: I am a computer engineer by profession and entered the application security domain early in my career. I joined Google in 2004 as one of the first ten security engineers and had the rare opportunity to co-found, lead, and grow the Information Security Team. At Google, I gained a tremendous appreciation for the security field, and in particular, how hard it is to protect web and mobile applications from an ever-growing list of security threats. Developers and security teams need to work together inseparably to accomplish this feat, and towards that goal, I helped implement a world-class security review process and conducted security reviews across Google’s myriad products.

In 2014, when Snap (formerly Snapchat) had a security issue that became very public, they recognized the need to start a security team and reached out to me. I was immediately intrigued by the challenges they were facing, including a Federal Trade Commission consent decree for privacy, and decided to leave Google and join as their first security hire….