02 Stephen Bailey, Day 1, DataEngBytes 2021

Data Engineers: Privacy Is Your Problem Stephen Bailey Stephen Bailey is the director of data and analytics at Immuta, the leader in universal cloud data access control. He has played many data roles: scientist, engineer, analyst, and data janitor. Stephen has a passion for learning and sharing with others, especially those trying to break into the data field. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and relishes the moments he gets to engage with others about the big picture around data. Since its founding in 2015, Immuta has provided secure, democratized, self-service access to cloud-based data for its customers spanning the financial, healthcare, government, manufacturing and technology industries. The company’s expertise in engineering, security, ethics and law has positioned itself as the leader in cloud data access control in an era defined by a complex landscape of multiple cloud data platforms and tools, hundreds of data privacy and business rules, and thousands of data pipelines. With Immuta, organizations can finally unlock the full value of their data -- even the most sensitive data -- while improving productivity, maintaining strong security, and enabling new data sharing use cases. The company uniquely automates fine-grained data access across any cloud environment through unified, dynamic access control policies. Data has the ability to transform and automate business processes. But data also comes with a responsibility to keep people’s personal information protected and ensure it is used in an ethical manner. It is the responsibility of data engineers to instinctively identify and separate dangerous data from the benign. In this session, Stephen Bailey PhD, director of data and analytics for Immuta, will discuss the need for data engineers to take on the responsibility of data privacy. While all organizations working with data understand the seriousness of data privacy, many aren’t sure who is responsible for protecting it. Stephen will explain why managing privacy loss is something only data engineers can solve, as data engineers are the ones who created the systems. He will outline a suggested new set of engineering best practices that go beyond the domains of security and system design. These best practices will include understanding the strengths and weaknesses of data masking, learning anonymization techniques like k-anonymization and differential privacy,. Ultimately, data engineers should know the practice of privacy by design as intuitively as they do the principle of least privilege. Attendees of this educational session will walk away with a better understanding of how they can improve data privacy without compromising data access control. Threats to data aren’t slowing down, so it’s time to fight against them.