Reimagining the role of chief privacy officers on campus: Opinion

The role of chief privacy officers should be reimagined to step beyond compliance functions and become advocates for privacy, write Michael Corn and Joanna Grama. Corn and Grama write that CPOs need to go beyond administrative and management work to consider privacy issues such as the appropriate use of data, ethical issues, and privacy advocacy. With trends like the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the nature of the sector as one of knowledge and research, the authors argue that chief privacy officers must become privacy advocates and consider the “wicked hard” privacy-related questions, such as how much information should be collected to effectively track campus health or prevent cheating or how campus Wi-Fi device connection data is used. The authors recommend that the role be split into two: An internal privacy compliance analyst position and a chief privacy officer position that is focused on the ethical and appropriate use of data. Inside Higher Ed (Acct. Req.) Note: Archived stories may contain dead links or be missing source links.