Month: June 2019

As with any form of discrimination, you are deprived of choice, and the right to choice is a human right.

The “cash is king” society is being replaced with digital money. What this means is that a large mass of individuals are marginalised because they don’t have money in the bank, but they may have money in their wallet.

Ha, you say now, it is only criminals which have something to hide? Well then that places me in a class of criminal in your mind: as I count the pennies in my wallet, -hoping that I have got a salary this month, to pay the faceless mr Taxman as much as I can, and take the rest out in cash- so I have enough money to pay for food for my family to survive.

When I first stepped into these new clothes of, what feels like a fugitive, I found that in Sweden, I couldn’t pay for the bus or buy a cup of coffee. Although I am learning to find out how to make it work, it is complicated. Hence I needed to work out out how to survive without money in the bank, even if I had cash in my wallet. I have opened my eyes up to a whole new world whereby cash is not king, whereby if you don’t have cash you are marginalised. Sweden is pretty advanced on the ‘cashless society’ vision.

It got me thinking again about bitcoin, not through my privacy eyes, but through the eyes of a marginalised individual, as a means as an alternative to money because ‘untraceable’ is built within its DNA, which I guess (as a non bitcoin guy) makes it an acceptable alternative to money.

Clearly bitcoin is a preferred currency for criminal networks because of this, and there are efforts to find a way to make bitcoin traceable to combat money laundering, and other shady stuff going on.

My marginalised hat hopes they don’t succeed. I hope that there is a future when the world is completely digitised that it is possible to survive when you have no money in your bank account. Today I can still find a coffee shop, and purchase metro/bus tickets at main stations, but tomorrow, I can’t imagine how it will be for those marginalised individuals and their families in a cashless world.

One year on from GDPR enactment and the market has stabilised. The panic of 2018 settled down in 2019. So much so that consulting friends of mine in UK, Ireland, Denmark and Sweden have commented to me that there is less demand for pure privacy/GDPR consulting as in-house competences have matured. This is how it should be in order to achieve ‘data protection by design by default’ across every business function.

In Sweden it has become very laid back after a frenzied panic of 2018. No fines yet, although the Datainspektion is promising us some action during the next 12 months. Seeing is believing I say and the latest news on Klarna may change this. The Datainspektion needs to make an example of some organisation which is not compliant, and soon, or they will not be taken seriously. The latest news on fines has been in Denmark, to a taxi company. Each Supervisory Authority is accountable to enforcement of the GDPR for their respective countries. If they do not then they need to answer to the EU level… even they could be penalised, yes Datainspektion can be penalised!

What’s cool is how the businesses are on the road seem to understanding that GDPR is not a pure legal problem, it is the whole business, and as such engagement of privacy champions across every business function is happening which I find very exciting. In fact the more employees who get what this is about, the more likely it is that the organisation will succeed without feeling that it inhibits innovation, in fact quite the opposite!

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If you want to get privacy champions in your organisation engaged at the right level, you can’t do much wrong to enroll them for the Privasee EAGLE online training, costs only €285 and it’s on a gamification platform so its actually fun!! Some of the larger organisations I’ve worked with have 100 spread out across every business function. IMHO every business should have at least one, if they have 5+ employees.

Sorry for the marketing plug here.. but Privasee needs to start making money on its products, and every training we sell helps us to continue the good work.. now we are challenged with cashflow during summer months…I’m a great privacy advocate and innovator but not interested in money per se. I wish I was then we wouldn’t have cashflow challenges.

If you love what we do, please either buy or recommend an EAGLE and get your privacy champions engaged in time for Autumn. Those who have done the training love it! If you do this please Comment or send a message so we can be sure to send a thank you token direct! If you want to resell Privacy products, we want to hear from you, unfortunately our ‘go-to-market’ sucks, reminding me of Novell who I worked for 7 years. We need to sell 100 EAGLEs to be flying again, if we sell 200 maybe I’ll be able to treat myself to haircut and a new pair of jeans 🙂

THANK YOU.