Data is the new oil and everyone’s personal data is at risk of being sold to the highest bidder if it’s not protected!

You're about to uncover the world of targeted marketing and why Privacy Pros are more important than ever in safeguarding data.

Hi, my name is Jamal Ahmed and I'd like to invite you to listen to this episode of the #1 ranked Data Privacy podcast.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• What search engines don’t want you to find out about their practices
• How to have a meaningful career in Privacy and stay ahead in the industry
• Plus the secret quality all employers look for in candidates

and so much more...

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Kelly Finnerty is the Director of Brand and Content for Startpage, the world’s most private search engine that does not collect any personal data or save people’s search history.

Throughout the last 14 years she has worked in Buenos Aires, London, New York and now LA helping to build and grow digital first brands. In her role at Startpage, Kelly interfaces with their global team and audience to develop and promote new features that help people protect their online privacy.

Follow Jamal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmjahmed/

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-finnerty-5267648/

Check out Startpage here: https://www.startpage.com/

Subscribe to the Privacy Pros Academy YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/PrivacyPros

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Privacy Pros Academy podcast. My name is Jamilla, and I'm a Data Privacy Analyst at Kazient Privacy Experts. With me today is my co host is Jamal Ahmed, who is a Fellow of Information Privacy and CEO at Kazient Privacy Experts. He makes regular appearances in the media and has been dubbed the King of GDPR by the BBC. And to date, he has provided privacy and GDPR compliance solutions to organisations across six continents and in over 30 jurisdictions, helping to safeguard the personal data of over a billion data subjects worldwide. Welcome, Jamal.

Hi, Jamilla. How are you today?

Every time I read that, I'm wondering which continent is left.

You know, you've got the ones in the North pole and the South pole, and it's the one that's really cold, and there isn't many people there, and if they are there, they're more concerned about staying alive than their privacy right now.

So let me introduce our guest for today. Our guest today is Kelly Finnerty, and she is the director of Brand and Content for Startpage, the world's most private search engine that does not collect any personal data or save people search history. Throughout the last 14 years, she has worked in Buenos Aires, London, New York and now LA. Helping to build and grow digital first brands. In her role at Startpage, Kelly interfaces with their global team and audience to develop and promote new features that help people protect their privacy online. Welcome, Kelly. Thank you for joining us today.

Hi. So good to be here. Nice to meet you both.

Welcome, Kelly. I'm so excited to have you on the show, and there's so many things I want to speak to you about. Take it away, Jamilla.

I was thinking, you've worked in London. What was your favourite thing about London?

I loved being able to walk everywhere. Being an LA Native, I had to drive everywhere. Literally. If you are in Los Angeles and you're walking, people kind of look at you strange and say, was your car hijacked? Where are you going? Are you all right? And so, when I moved to London, just being able to walk everywhere was fantastic. There's always something interesting occurring. There's always a piece of history around the corner. It was charming and I enjoyed my time there so much. I was there for almost four years.

You can't get bored in London.

Absolutely not.

I've got a question for Kelly, right. So many of my friends, family, so many of our clients, our mentees, everyone is using Google, Yahoo, the major search engines. What is the problem with the search engines when it comes to our right to privacy? How is it actually impacting our privacy?

Working at Startpage is something that's very near and dear to my heart. And it's really started where big tech has created this hall of one way mirrors and for us as the individual. We see this as search engines we go to everyday, the websites we visit, the apps we use. And for us, we're accessing information, we're accessing entertainment. It's become a daily part of our lives. But what we don't see is the other side of that one way mirror where big tech is collecting every action that you're doing. They're looking at where you are, what you're looking at, and not only are they looking at that information, but then they're also selling that information to data harvesters, to advertisers, and all of that is happening without the general public really knowing about it or really saying that they feel okay and comfortable about it. What many people don't know is on their search history. You can clear it as many times as you want, but that is still being stored into your digital profile. And that search history is being used to auction off to the highest bidder. Who says this person is having certain health conditions? Maybe we want to send them pharmaceutical ads or this person's having financial issues. Maybe we need to put them in this Data Harvester category and sell them off to an insurance broker. There's a lot of scary and detrimental things that can happen with your personal data. In my opinion, there's nothing as personal as your search history. It truly is a diary of what is happening in your life at that time.

You mentioned a digital profile. Does everyone have a digital profile?

Everybody has some version of a digital profile. People will try to find different ways to outsmart the identifiers and the trackers that they're trying to place on you. Maybe using a VPN to change your IP address. But if you're using the same cell phone or the same laptop, if you have a Google account, if you have a Facebook account, absolutely. Your digital profile is growing more and more each day.

They collect so many different things. What is the scariest story you've come across where someone had their digital profile be manipulated and used against them in a way that actually led them to some kind of harm?

It's interesting to think about how search histories are often used in court of law. You can now use someone's search history to draw a picture of their character.

Yes.

And these aren't things that you're doing. These are things that you're thinking about, you're searching about, you're interested in. But if that's taken out of context and used to paint a picture of who you are as a person, that becomes pretty dangerous. The things that you're searching for might be for that moment. Maybe you're doing a research piece, but they're not identical reflections of what you're doing. And so to have somebody else narrate your personal search history and then make a judgment on who you are as a person is pretty dangerous. It was in the UK where people who are searching for treatment or support with alcoholism or being served ads by alcohol brands. Well, everything that you search for, you get put in a category. You can be targeted and somebody can say, well, this person is interested in alcohol.

And that's really interesting that you mentioned they were getting marketed adverts about alcohol. Do you think privacy and marketing could exist together? As marketing is moving towards more things like personal ads and targeted ads, can you still be private and market to people effectively?.

At Startpages' Director of Brands I'm thinking about that on a daily basis. We don't track our users. We try to find ways that are safe to understand. Are they enjoying the product? Is there anything that's not serving them? How can we find new people like them? And the best way to do that for us is having either one on one conversations with our users, maybe on social media, through surveys where we're respecting their privacy, but really getting that feedback from them versus buying on them. And I think that marketers, when they're just kind of taking that, okay, we're going to target people based on this data, is maybe the easier way out. But if you take the time to actually build relationships, listen to your audience, you're actually going to find a lot more fruitful information about how you can connect with them.

Absolutely. I totally agree, building relationships, giving value that is the best way to build a business. And you're not just building a business that way, you're actually creating a bunch of raving fans who will actually go out and tell everyone about how great your product or your service is. One of the not so pleasant stories I remember was, there was a teenage girl and she got herself pregnant and she hadn't told her parents. But because of what she was searching for online, because of what was on her digital profile, one of these companies actually sent her stuff that you would normally send to people who are pregnant. And her parents received the mail and they found out she was pregnant through that before she even managed to tell the parents. Just so she's a very young teenage. She has a very conservative background where you don't get pregnant outside of wedlock. And that had significant consequences, not just to her mental health, but just to her relationship with her parents. We can really see why it can be really creepy reading people's digital profiles and using it in ways which you wouldn't expect. And another problem, I have some of these apps that track people's menstrual cycles and they actually use that data to feed into the digital profile to target them with different things around different times of their cycle. They actually also have price fluctuations where they have different prices based on what stage of the cycle they're in. I don't understand the science behind it, but it sounds like pure evil to me.

Sounds creepy, it sounds manipulative and really unnecessary. If you're trying to build trust with an audience of your product. Having policies in place where you don't allow certain things like this are so important because once that information gets out, there's no going back from that and the trust in your brand has been completely lost. Unfortunately though, that example that you gave with the menstrual tracking app is very true. That also exists with things like your activity trackers, that exist with your financial trackers, where you're keeping notes on how you're doing with your finances. That is a huge source of income for all of those. Free apps are usually selling your data to someone else who's going to use it in some other way to potentially and most likely manipulate you. And then the story of young girl with her parents finding out that she was pregnant through kind of her search history. At the end of the day, the internet has been this great access for information and we want people to be able to access the information that they need without judgment, without prying eyes, and to be able to do it in a safe way. Other examples someone who's in a domestic abuse situation, they are being heavily monitored by the person that's in their household. Startpage is something where it's a safe solution for someone to get information without having someone controlling them or watching what they're doing.

It's very scary. I guess you have to think about is the convenience of tracking my cycle or tracking my calorie worth what they're potentially gaining from me putting all that information in? And I think it's quite hard as an individual who maybe doesn't know very much about data privacy to make that decision.

Each person has a different privacy threat level for their own life. And to really start to think about every single new app that you're using, the data that you're giving to them, think about how would you feel comfortable with that being public? You take that thought that might make you look into and investigate what are the practices of this app? Are there other solutions out there that are more private? What's cool right now is that every single day there's a new product that's coming up that actually has taken that step to be more private. I'm so excited about the future of privacy tech. Each day we're seeing new solutions to very convenient tools, but now make it private. For me, that's really exciting.

It definitely wasn't a direct, linear path to privacy for me. In fact, I spent most of my career working in marketing for major Fortune 500 brands, working on huge projects, huge budgets, and it was really fun. But I did struggle with a bit of personal meaning behind what I was doing. And then when I moved back to LA, two friends from college and I, we started this nonprofit called Real Good, where we pair volunteering event with kind of going out to a restaurant or bar and just making volunteering really fun and easy. It was so much fun to create this startup that was just really meaningful. I said if I could find a way to feel that meaning with my actual job, that would just be next level. Then Startpage came around, and it's this product that sincerely makes it easy for anyone to start taking control of what big tech is collecting on you start taking control of all of the opportunities for manipulation occur out there. They do it in a way that's easy because a lot of stuff with privacy right now isn't easy. It takes multiple steps. So Start page just makes it super easy. So for me, I left out that chance because they said, if I'm going to invest my time and energy into building a brand, a product, how cool is it to really do that for one that's helping people? That's what got me interested in privacy. If I can help communicate and raise awareness around how data collection works and how people can protect themselves, that's a really exciting spot to be.

Awesome. Thank you very much for sharing. You wanted to have a career where it's actually meaningful because you might have been in a career at that time where you wasn't getting that meaning. You starting doing things outside of work to have that sense of self fulfillment. And then you came across start page, which gave you that meaning because you're actually upholding people's right to have that privacy. And you were like, hang on, this is cool. I'm actually going out helping people while making sure that I have a career, and this is something I'm passionate about, and it's something that is also rewarding.

Exactly.

Since joining, it's just been an awesome experience and everyone on the team cares about it, and everyone's bringing new ideas about different ways we can help people online. It's a really great group of people.

Also, for anyone listening, you've got a great blog called Privacy Please. So for all of our Privacy Pros and aspiring Privacy Pros, go check out the blog. There's so much information there that would really help us to start questioning, to start really upskilling the work that we're doing and bring some more meaning to the rewarding, challenging, and meaningful career. I'm looking through your LinkedIn profile. A number of things that really resonated with me. I've picked a couple of them because they were my favorite. It really aligns with the values that we have at the Privacy Pros Academy. One of the things that you say on your LinkedIn profile is you have an inherent curiosity. You're a lifelong learner who strives to constantly grow and develop. As a professional and as a person, I love that. I'm a huge advocate of constant growth and development. Can you explain why that's important for our listeners, for those people who are Aspiring Privacy Pros and why sometimes just picking up a book and learning how to pass the exams isn't really the way forward?

Well, curiosity extends professionally, personally, me as an individual, I'm always thinking about what is the why behind that? Also trying to learn about the world around me. That's always changing. That inherent curiosity has served me well. I think it's okay when you realise that you don't know something and that there are tools and pathways for you to learn about it. You guys put together this really great program where someone who is curious about privacy can have this curated path. But really it's up to them and their curiosity to ask questions while they're going down that path and to meet with other people. So much comes from that community talking and sharing, asking questions. And that is like, where curiosity can really take learning to the next level. You can read a book. What do you do afterwards? Do you try to apply it to your life? Do you ask questions to other people who've also read the book? Do you reach out to the author and try to understand why they wrote it? Curiosity kind of just take learning to the next level.

Thank you for sharing that. I believe the only reason we've managed to achieve and have some of the success that we've had with a number of things is because we were so curious about things. Why isn't there a better way of doing this? Surely there's an easier way of communicating this to people. The Privacy Pros Academy and our twelve week signature program you mentioned was really born out of that frustration, that curiosity about why can't we do things better? Or why are things not that way? I remember when I went through my journey, it was very frustrating. There wasn't really many mentors I could go to. I went through so many self study groups. I went through so many WhatsApp groups but it was filled with people with a very fixed mindset. These people were uncomfortable about challenging themselves. They were very uncomfortable about investing in themselves. They just passed an exam. And I was like, this community isn't right for me. And it was when I found myself a mentor who was able to guide me. It really helped me to change my whole life around. That's why I put the Privacy Programs Academy to mentor people based on my experiences. And that's why we have the five pillars that we focus on. So the first pillar we really focus on is the mindset. We get rid of this fixed mindset and we move you to a growth mindset. We strip down all of those self limiting decisions, all of those false beliefs, all of the times you've held yourself back because someone in your life has told you you're not good enough or you can't make it. We get rid of all of those things and we show them that anything is possible as long as we have a strategy and a plan and we put it in place. I always say to my mentees, like, do your best and God will take care of the rest.

So far he has been. I love that. And I just think about too when hiring new people for my team, or when we hire new people for even the product team at Startpage. Hiring people who know the information is great, but that's just like the bread and butter. You want to have that person who's going to ask questions, who's going to challenge things, and not to be like a rebel, but more so to see, hey, is there a better way? I love that you're teaching that mindset for people because that's what employers are looking for. They want someone who can bring that change, that interest and curiosity to the company.

You're absolutely right. Because when people come through the program, one of the reasons they come through the program is because they want more from their life. They want more fulfillment, they want more meaning, and oftentimes they want more financial reward. So they come through the program where they graduate as an elite, World Class Privacy Professional. And one of the things that really sticks out when we ask people for feedback, or when we see them post about it on LinkedIn, is they don't talk about the other four pillars as much as they talk about this first pillar about mindset. We teach people privacy. We take you through a Privacy Program, we spend ten weeks talking about privacy, and out of those two weeks, we spend about two weeks talking about the mindset. The one common thing they all come back with whenever we ask them for feedback, whenever they post about it, is how their mindset transformed and how they are so much richer in their lives as a result of changing. And shifting that mindset.

What would be your top three pieces of advice for privacy professionals who really want to take their career to the next level?

One piece of advice is always finding your why, really connecting to your story of why you're interested in privacy and getting that down into a bite size sentence. And that will really serve you when in you're in your interviews also really serve you when you start looking for what job is right for you too. So it's not just to get the job, but for you to find the job that's right for you too would be. Really think about what your own privacy threat level is for yourself, putting that together and knowing what tools you feel safe with. Once you have that list, really dig into what you like about those tools and what they do for you and what are the privacy policies behind those tools. So hopefully you could bring that to your next job, apply that to the next product that you're going to help work on. Three would be always stay on once you've got the job. That's not the end. There's new development and privacy every day. Finding a way to schedule time to continue learning, to continue reading about new legislation, new products, new technology. Make sure that once you've got the job, you're not stopping in your education process.

And that really ties back into what you were saying about being a lifelong learner. You don't get there when you stop. You have to continue, you have to progress, and you have to stay up to date.

Absolutely.

The other thing from your LinkedIn profile that I really loved was delivering excellent. Here at the Privacy Pros Academy, we're only interested in people who want to deliver excellence, and we're only interested in delivering excellence, which is why we will only work with people who actually want to become elite, World Class Privacy Professionals. If you want to be an average privacy professional, we're not going to be a right fit. So we refer them out and say, hey, there's plenty of other guys that you can go to that will help you with that. Go through the conveyor belt system and you'll be just fine. But we're for the people who want to be the best, who want to deliver excellence, not just for their clients, not just for all of those individuals who they're going to serve, but who want to actually deliver excellence for themselves because they hold themselves up to that level of standard. When I was doing my research on Kelly, I was like, you know, Kelly, you're going to be such an awesome gift because you embody the values that we try to instill in individuals on the Privacy Pros Accelerator program.

Delivering excellence. Great to strive for, but excellence is also always pretty subjective too. So I think when you're working on a project, it's about getting to a point where you feel really good about the deliverable. You also test it out with people within your organization. You test it out with your users. You take on feedback. My interpretation of excellence is only great if it also serves the rest of my team and our audience. Since excellence is so subjective, I think finding ways to get feedback on your work is really important. Other element of it too, is being able to let your ego go and really take on that feedback, really hear that feedback in a way that you don't feel like you're being criticized, but that you're actually being helped to achieve excellence.

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. It's so valuable to hear that. You're right. Excellence is very subjective. And at the Privacy Pro Academy, the way we measure excellence is based on three things. Number one, clarity. Have you got clarity in your understanding of this? If you have, then that's if you're producing something for somebody else, if you're writing a privacy notice, you're writing a policy, think of your audience. And has the audience have total clarity from whatever you are about to impart on? If they can, that's great. That's excellent. So that's the first measure of excellence is clarity. The second measure of excellence for us is confidence. Are you confident in your knowledge? Are you confident in your practice? Are you confident that you've understood the problem? If you're not, then we haven't reached excellence. So in order to reach excellence, we need to have confidence, and we need to make sure that any solutions that we deliver, anything that we propose, any training we deliver, the individuals who are receiving it are now left confident that they know what to do, how this impacts them. So clarity, confidence, and the third thing is all about credibility. So that's the measure of excellence and credibility can come in a number of ways. It can be certifications, it can be achieving a certain standard. But those are the three criteria we measure to make excellence a little bit more objective. And less objective is clarity, confidence, and credibility. If we can hit those three C's, then we're in a good place.

That's awesome. I actually had never heard excellence described with those pillars behind them, but it makes a lot of sense. It might borrow that, if you don't mind.

Feel free. We're always happy to share. We're all about sharing value. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, what employers are looking for, and yes, everyone might or might not have the skill set. So the second pillar that we really focus on is helping them to have that breadth and depth of knowledge, both of the mentoring program with our students, and then they will often, at the end of the program, during the program, start applying for new roles to see what's out there for them and how they can now reflect their skills. One of the things we find is our mentees often get offers within a few hours of doing the interview. So normally what's happened here in the UK is you'll hear by the end of the week, at the end of the process, but what we're finding is they're saying, hey, take those people off the market because someone else is going to snap them up. And when we go back and ask the recruitment for feedback, why is that? They say they loved your mindset, they loved your attitude, they loved the way you ask questions, and that all comes down to that mindset and having that excellence behind them, because we train them. Before you go into the interviews, make sure you have total clarity. You give them total clarity. Make sure you have total confidence. Make sure they have total confidence in your answers, and that will make you credible as the best candidate for them for the job. Recently, we had somebody go through the program, gentleman by the name of Adnan. You might see some of his stories on social media. So he joined the program. He was about ten weeks into the program when he felt confident enough to start applying for new roles. In one week, he had four interviews.

That is awesome and really unheard of, too. I mean, that's great.

Absolutely. I mean, this is the thing, right? Unless he had that evidence, nobody would believe it. Everyone's like, Whatever. But he had four offers. He messaged me after a third of us saying, I need to stop doing interviews because I'm getting all these offers and I don't know what to do. And I feel really bad. Like, he feels bad to reject them. He's never been in that position before in his life. So he's like, I've got this problem. I was like, isn't that a great problem to have?

That is definitely a great problem to have. And the dream scenario for anyone in that job search time period, because looking for a job is really hard.

That really comes back to what you've identified there, Kelly, is that employers know that the skill set or the knowledge can be acquired through the job. It's very hard to change someone's mindset. It's very hard to find somebody with the right attitude. And when they do, they want to grab them with both hands and make sure that when they're at the interview, they don't walk out the front door without signing a contract.

It serves you in life in general, if you ask questions, one, you're showing that you're sincerely interested. Let's say if you're like talking to a friend, right, and you ask questions about where they grew up or why they did a certain asking questions shows interest. It also shows that you are a person who is interested in problem solving in general. Being able to build that into your job search interview process, I think, makes you a stronger candidate. At Startpage, we love people asking questions. Hey, how does this actually work? You say you're a private search engine. How do you actually do that? That's one of my favourite things, are when people are challenging the start page or asking for more information. We are the only private search engine to have published our data flow because we want to be as transparent as possible with people. And that's huge in the privacy world, that transparency. So if you're building that initially into people's mindset, that's just going to make them really strong professionals in the future.

And guess what, Kelly, what you've said there about being transparent, if we use our measure of excellence for that, are people clear about what you are or are not doing with their data? Yes, they are. Are they confident that they know what's going to happen with their data when they use stock page? Yes, they do. Does that give stoppage the credibility to be the world's leading search engine? Absolutely. So by our measure of excellence, you guys are doing a pretty good job.

Thanks we're trying.

What are some of the things you look for when you're hiring someone, especially in privacy roles?

I look for someone who's also connected to the wider culture and world of privacy. Right. For someone who's paying attention to what the competitors are doing or what companies, maybe not even in the same industry, are doing when it comes to privacy. Somebody who has their eyes up looking at the world is going to be able to bring a lot more information and thinking to our company than someone who's just focused on one thing. Someone who's thinking about how it's all connected is somebody that I'm really interested in.

Kelly, it sounds like you've been through our academy because one of the things that we teach as part of the mindset is they always should take a step back and have a look at the whole picture. We want them to lose that tunnel vision. We want them to lose that. We want them to see the periphery. We want them to have peripheral vision and say, okay, that's great, that's what's working here. But that doesn't mean that's the only way of doing things just because. This is the only thing I know. And that's why anyone that comes on to any of our programs, we introduce them to my inner circle of Elite World Class Privacy Pros from all around the world, from all different sectors. And sometimes just witnessing some of the conversations some of the pros are having with each other, for me, gives me a whole new education, networking with people from other vertical sectors, from other industries. So, for example, if someone is in healthcare and then someone's in working with children in schools and then someone's in it and someone is in finance, when you say, hey, how are you guys doing things in your industry? Hey, what's commonly accepted over here? How do you guys challenge that problem? And then everyone gives their shared views from that. That's what makes our mentees so much more valuable to organisations when they go in there, because not only are you getting the person in front of you, but you're getting the whole network of World Class Privacy Pros as well that they can always go to for the additional ideas, inspiration, double checking.

That's really valuable. All right, Jamal, question for you. I understand you have students from all over the world in your course. What parts of the world are most interested in careers in privacy right now?

It's an excellent question. So I've delivered privacy training to people in 137 countries, but what we see most people are interested in getting actual accredited data in Data Privacy is in the UK, is in Europe and is in North America. And increasingly, we're seeing an appetite in places like India, places like Australia and New Zealand. I believe it's because we're seeing new privacy laws being introduced in some of those countries that are either at reading stage or they're at a stage where they passed but have not yet come into force. And people are actually figuring out, hang on a minute, this privacy industry is actually booming. Businesses are trying to find out, what do we need to do to make sure we're compliant so we can actually trade globally. Because one of the things that businesses are finding is people are really starting to care about their privacy, and they would rather buy from a company who cares about their privacy, even if it's an inferior product, than a company who's selling a better spec product but is not looking after the privacy for the same price. And there's lots of proven studies that demonstrate all of those things. And this is one of the great reasons why you can come to Startpage, you can put in a search, and you can go and find privacy, safe ways of doing all of your shopping, looking for all of your articles with confidence that it's not going to be used against you later on to be creepy or to give you a price based on your search history.

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you so much, Kelly, for joining us on the podcast today. We've really enjoyed speaking with you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much from myself as well Kelly.

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