New initiative aims to revolutionize the way companies run privacy programs
WASHINGTON, April 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- TerraTrue, an innovator in privacy, today announced its Shift Left Privacy initiative on the first day of the International Association of Privacy Professionals Global Privacy Summit (#GPS22). TerraTrue wants to modernize privacy, shifting the discipline from its historically reactive and siloed posture to a scalably proactive approach that's deeply integrated into a company's product development.
Shift Left Privacy (#ShiftLeftPrivacy) is a call to arms to educate privacy professionals and fundamentally shift how companies think about privacy as they carry out any initiative. By launching the initiative, TerraTrue looks to empower companies to break the silos between product and privacy functions and activate modern privacy programs. TerraTrue crafted the initiative to help elevate privacy as a strategic lever that's woven into a company's values, brand, and culture by bringing privacy into the forethought versus it being an afterthought.
The Origins of Shift Left
Traditionally, product development can be plotted on a continuum — with the germs of great ideas on the left, ending with deploying fully built products on the right. Shift Left as a principle started in software development testing, but it was soon adopted by other disciplines such as Information Security. Following some high-profile data breaches, security was brought forward in the development process. Fast-forward to today, and security teams largely know the product plan early enough to flag issues before they become deployment-date disasters. TerraTrue wants to lead the charge in highlighting the benefits of a Shift Left mindset for the privacy space.
Privacy has historically occupied an almost-off-the-chart rightward position. By the time privacy teams get involved, it's almost always after a company has begun collecting data. It's an inherently reactive position that's no longer viable. The privacy revolution is forcing companies to Shift Left their privacy programs: to transform from reactive to proactive.
"Privacy has historically been a siloed function,'' said Chris Handman, Co-founder and COO of TerraTrue and former Snap general counsel. "And more than that, lawyers have been dubbed as being bottlenecks. But it's not really their fault. They simply don't have the tools. Years ago, privacy teams had a fighting chance to learn what was coming down the pike, consult with product teams, and suss out at least some of the privacy issues at play. Now, companies are shipping multiple features every two weeks, every week, and sometimes daily. The pace and volume of product development today doesn't allow privacy teams to be proactive. Shift Left Privacy is a platform to spark a proactive approach."
The Epicenter of Privacy Laws
Since 2018 with the GDPR, a spate of laws around the world are pushing companies to understand four key things before shipping products: what data will they collect, how will they use it, who will they share it with, and where will they store it. The answers to those questions, and the scores of sub-questions they invite, pose mammoth risks under one or more of these complex, dizzying array of global rules. Even though the GDPR now made it more imperative than ever to get privacy right, what the privacy team sends the product team are spreadsheets and fixed templates in Google docs, all scattered across scores of email threads and Slack channels.
All of this unstructured data means starting from scratch every time, making it impossible to scale as complexity grows. Plus, there's a number of downstream workflows and documentation that these laws require teams to maintain. Teams are then asked to do the same work all over again to update data maps, ROPAs, and other downstream documentation. By adopting a Shift Left mindset and modern tools, product and privacy teams can work together in a proactive manner with a unified workflow to help ship better products faster.
"We're excited to bring a new way of thinking into the privacy space to help companies Shift Left to make privacy programs enablers to efficient product development versus them being gatekeepers," said Jad Boutros, Co-founder and CEO of TerraTrue and former chief security officer at Snap.
Read more about the Shift Left Privacy initiative here
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About TerraTrue
TerraTrue empowers teams to build privacy and security into everything they do through a collaborative, intuitive, and scalable platform. Purpose-built to work with modern product development, TerraTrue seamlessly captures structured data about how teams plan to collect, use, store, and share data. The platform then maps that digital blueprint to the world's privacy laws to automate guidance, risk-flagging, and downstream data maps and reports. Sitting as a hub between product teams and review teams, TerraTrue also smartly routes rule-based workflows throughout an organization, automatically detects and reports infrastructure changes in cloud environments, and drives vendor management — all from the same single source of truth. With TerraTrue's digital privacy platform, companies run a scalable, fast privacy-by-design program that eliminates spreadsheets, manual ad-hoc processes, and compliance bottlenecks. TerraTrue was founded in 2018 by former Snap execs and is backed by, among others, 3L Capital, Anthos Capital, and Chris Sacca. Modern brands like Lyft, Robinhood, Roku, and Foursquare use TerraTrue to get privacy right. Learn more at terratrue.com.
Brian Ferrario
Head of Global Marketing
TerraTrue
brian@terratrue.com
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SOURCE TerraTrue
