Here are your 10 most downloaded privacy podcasts of 2018

Making this list was so much fun. 

When my boss, Sam Pfeifle, charged me with creating a privacy-focused podcast a couple years ago, I was slightly annoyed. I didn’t know anything about podcasts, I didn’t even listen to podcasts, and it sounded like it was going to be some weekly chore I would dread. 

I was so wrong. Growing a podcast not only turned out to be an incredibly satisfying creative outlet for me, but it also helped me to understand the industry and the people who staff it so much better. These one-on-one conversations with incredibly intelligent and capable people made me feel part of our profession in a way I hadn’t tapped into before, and I also learned so much about everything from the way EU institutions operate to how advertising technology works to why Jay Edelson is going after Kanye West for alleged privacy violations.

We’ve got some very loyal listeners at The Privacy Advisor Podcast, and I’m proud to say our downloads sky rocketed this year. Thousands upon thousands of you listened to me complain about how hot the summer in D.C. is and kept tuning in every week as I worked to get better at delivering you the kind of interviews that might feel helpful to you as you work to become better privacy pros. I’m really proud of this year’s catalogue for the breadth we covered together and the conversations some of these podcasts incited among us online — namely on Twitter. This project is personal to me, largely because it brought me closer to you, my peers, the people I’m working for. 

Thanks for tuning in and for letting me into your headphones. Catch you in January for a whole new season. 

The ad tech industry is facing a crisis of sorts, depending on whom you ask. The big deal is that the GDPR places importance on transparency and user consent. And to date, those are two things the ad tech industry has been sort of lucky enough to on without a whole lot of. In this episode, Matthias Matthiesen, CIPP/E, who heads the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s privacy and public policy in Brussels, described the problems at hand and IAB’s proposed solutions — solutions not everyone agrees with. 

The New York Times refers to him as Silicon Valley’s “baby faced boogeyman” for his aggressive court takedowns of tech behemoths. And he’s got a very firm grasp on the global privacy and data protection legislative landscape. In this episode, plaintiff’s attorney Jay Edelson talked about a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for alleged violation of biometric privacy law, and another against Kanye West over alleged consumer privacy violations. Edelson also discussed why he thinks the new California Consumer Privacy Act is no good. 

David Reitman is a board-certified adolescent medicine specialist. Marc Groman, CIPP/US, served as the senior adviser for privacy in the Obama White House at the Office of Management and Budget. Together, they’re raising an 11 year old. In this live recording at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit, Groman and Reitman discussed the complications of raising children in today’s rapidly evolving digital world, where the pressures to be online are real, and the pitfalls are plentiful.

So, the big day finally arrived.