The RSA Conference 2021 Virtual Experience is happening May 17-20 and Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, will be providing a summary of some of the leading stories from the conference to help you stay informed.

When many Americans shifted the bulk of their work and social lives online last year, they not not only altered their everyday habits but also increased their reliance upon a digital world that many feel offers limited privacy protections. Though states such as California have passed privacy laws, the lack of a modern set of federal protections has not gone unnoticed.

“The pandemic has absolutely changed, I believe forever, people's relationship with technology,” said Julie Brill, Microsoft’s Chief Privacy Officer, and former FTC commissioner, speaking at the RSA conference on Wednesday. An increasingly heavy reliance upon digital technology and platforms has “raised consumer’s expectations about how their data is going to be used and how it should be used.”

Brill was one of two featured privacy experts in an RSA session called A Year Spent Virtually - The Lasting Effect of the COVID Pandemic on Privacy. Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor, a MacArthur Fellow and author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace addressed a wide spectrum of privacy concerns such as cyber surveillance and the unauthorized sharing of intimate information on digital platforms. “We've always been under surveillance by companies in ways that we can't even fathom,” contends Citron. “We can’t feel data when we give it up — it doesn’t ping.”

Jules Polonetsky, CEO of Future of Privacy Forum, moderated the panel and explored the top concerns for many since the outset of the pandemic. “Those of us who work at the intersection of data and technology obviously have been grappling with the incredible forces of change, the digital acceleration, but also the intense need for data to track COVID for exposure notification” among many other privacy-related concerns, said Polonetsky.

In search of Protections

The panel expressed concern and conveyed some frustration that while the past year has heightened public awareness of digital privacy infringements, there’s been little action to ramp up protections. While the panel considered whether the US may eventually adopt some variation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Brill mused that “there’s a hope that privacy laws can address a number of issues.” She states that for many the importance of privacy is simply having the ability to say “no, I don’t want my data used in that way, or I want to really understand what you’re going to do with my data.”

Brill believes that COVID pandemic has “accelerated and sharpened this feeling” that many people have about technologies and data privacy. “Am I really in control and is this company really to be trusted?” asks Brill.

While America lacks a comprehensive set of digital privacy laws, according to the panel’s privacy experts, there's been no lack of discussion about what’s needed in one, should Congress opt to address these concerns. Earlier in the discussion, Polonetsky framed a thought-provoking question about people’s hopes for digital privacy protections. Is it reasonable to “ask privacy laws to solve all these problems of society?” There were no immediate answers amid mounting concerns about data privacy issues amid the pandemic.