Twitter was among the most recognizable brands to join CES, the annual tech show that kicked off in Las Vegas this week. Damien Kieran, Twitter's Global Data Protection Officer, spoke to Cheddar about how his team is ensuring compliance with data protection laws around the world.
"A good example of this recently would be the GDPR and the CCPA." Kieran said, referring to General Data Protection Regulation, a law pertaining to data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which requires companies to tell Californians how their data is being used.
The new regulations provide potential challenges to Kieran's team.
"Under the GDPR, companies have 30 days to respond to a consumer's request for information. Under the CCPA, they have 45 days." Kieran told Cheddar. "When you're trying to build a service that can operate globally irrespective of where people live, those operational challenges become difficult. We try to standardize things as much as we can but it's a constantly evolving process."
From a user standpoint, Kieran says "one of the things we strive for is to try and give people the same controls around the world and the same transparency into how the service works around the world."
The security expert also says Twitter has made strides to be more transparent about security and privacy, referencing what he calls the "invisible work" that goes into ensuring data protection.
"We historically haven't spoken a lot about that work but we're starting to change that as we go into 2020. We recognize that there's a desire both among our consumers and our partners about how Twitter thinks about these things and deals with these things."
Kieran says there are three components to the internal or "invisible" work that consumers don't notice: dealing with technical debt, dealing with how to build new products and features, and the accountability of Twitter when people use its services
"Towards the end of 2019 we published a blog post to explain a lot more about why they were seeing these things. That it was actually part of an ongoing internal strategy. We've been working to fix technical debt and when we have uncovered things that we think people need to know about, we have communicated with them. We want them to know what we're doing to fix things," Kieran told Cheddar. "The goal of my team is to make sure that people around the world are constantly learning and they really understand what data we get and how we use it. We don't want there to be surprises."
