Growing up, July 4th meant watching fireworks with my family on the beach somewhere overlooking Long Island Sound, and for many years with takeout from Roy Rogers (those biscuits were SO good!).
When my kids were young, we joined the rest of Atlanta on 30A (beautiful white sandy beaches in the FL panhandle) and celebrated July 4th on the beach. My most memorable July 4th was biking back after fireworks to our rental house in the dark during a massive rain and lightning storm. I’m glad not to repeat that experience again.
Somewhere along the way, our summer vacations changed, and we’ve been more local for fireworks. It is different from watching them over the water. And some years, I’ve enjoyed a quiet night at home flipping across multiple channels to catch Boston, NYC, or DC.
Lucky me, one year I endured the 12-hour wait to claim our spot to see the Boston Pops, and that year Rascal Flatts played. I’m glad I can say I did that, but that type of all-day adventure and crowd is not quite my thing.
Here’s a picture of us – aren’t we so cute?
After five trips to Washington, DC in the past six months, I’ve seen and heard a LOT about celebrating 250 years this weekend. It got me thinking about what the holiday marks, fully appreciating that people will have different perspectives.
This weekend marks 250 years of a country built on the idea that certain freedoms have to be declared and then defended, over and over, because they do not sustain themselves. People have to choose to protect those freedoms, generation after generation, even when the work is hard, and the progress is slow.
Privacy is one of those freedoms. And the people doing the work to protect it right now are more important than I think they sometimes realize.
Freedom and Privacy Are Not That Different
The Declaration of Independence did not hand Americans a finished democracy. It declared an intention. The hard work of building the systems, laws, and institutions to make that intention real took decades, and, in many ways, it is still happening.
Privacy law in the United States looks a lot like that right now. The intention is there, with states passing laws and rights being declared. But the patchwork is uneven, enforcement is inconsistent, and the systems companies need to actually honor those rights are still being built, often imperfectly, one policy and one process at a time.
The rights themselves are worth pausing on this week: knowing what data a company holds about you, asking for it to be deleted, and saying no to how it gets used. None of that is a checkbox on a form. It is the ability to control your own information, decide who profits from it, and have some say in how you are seen and treated because of it.
Here is the part that gets lost. Privacy is not one freedom sitting beside the others we celebrate this week. It is the one holding them up. It is a lot easier to speak your mind, follow your curiosity, or join a cause when you are not wondering who is keeping track. Privacy is what gives people that room.
When people trust that their private lives are their own, they show up more willing to speak, create, and take part. It’s not often talked about until someone feels information was tracked, sold, shared, or used in a manner they did not expect, and then they feel their freedom and privacy have been violated.
Laws are being created to protect this freedom; privacy professionals are ensuring people’s privacy rights actually exist within companies and not just theoretically on paper.
You Are a Consumer Too
This is something I think privacy professionals can lose sight of when they are deep in building programs and responding to audits, managing vendors, and tracking legislative updates. You are not just the person building the system. You are also the person the system is supposed to protect.
Your data is out there. Your information is being collected, shared, and used by companies whose privacy practices you have never reviewed. You get marketing emails you did not ask for. Your location data has been logged by apps you stopped using two years ago. Your purchase history has been sold to someone you have never heard of.
When you push your company to build a proper deletion or opt-out workflow or train your team on how to handle an access request, you are not just doing compliance work.
You are the difference between a right that exists on paper and one that actually delivers when someone reaches for it. People like your family, friends, neighbors, or YOU!
This week of all weeks, that is worth holding onto, especially on the days the work feels invisible.
The Fight is Not Over and That is the Point
Privacy professionals operate in a field that is still being defined. Laws change, regulations get added, and enforcement priorities shift without much warning. The work can feel relentless, especially when you are the person in the room reminding everyone that the new product launch needs a privacy review before it goes live.
But that is exactly why the people doing this work matter. Rights and freedoms do not protect themselves. They require people who understand what is at stake, who know how the systems actually work, and who keep showing up for the unglamorous parts of the job, like the policy reviews that might not get as fully read as we hoped and the training sessions that half the company reschedules.
250 years ago, a group of people decided certain rights were worth declaring even when the path to making them real was unclear, and the opposition was formidable. Privacy professionals are doing a version of that same thing, in conference rooms and on compliance calls, and in the weeds of cookie consent frameworks and state law charts.
The people whose data you protect are real. They are your neighbors and your family. Some days they are you. That counts for something, and it is reason enough to stay in the work even when it is slow, hard, and underappreciated.
Happy 250th
This week, wherever you are and however you are spending the holiday, I hope you take a moment to connect the work you do every day to something bigger than the compliance calendar.
Individuals have rights and freedoms. You are one of the special people defending the right to privacy.
I hope you’ve had an amazing weekend!
Jodi
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