I am excited to be attending the IAPP Privacy Academy next week in San Francisco. If you'll be there and want to meet up, drop me a line at jmulligan at forrester dot com. It's a chance for privacy professionals to come together and discuss the issues they are facing with peers, and to learn from the individual working groups. Looking ahead to the themes and discussions offered, I am not surprised by many of the current hot topics:

• Global privacy best practices. At least six sessions are focused on how to handle privacy in a global setting. These sessions explain information about specific geographies (i.e. Europe or Latin America) or the difficulties of global data transfer.
• Emerging technology issues. Multiple sessions are focused on upcoming technology like RFID and IPv6 (although I've ready so many stories about how IPv6 really is coming over the years, I'd attend this talk with a very skeptical attitude).
• Niche discussions for specific verticals. IAPP has organized their discussion groups around verticals and their specific privacy interests. Individual talks also cater to these groups such as government, higher education, marketing, and health care.

A less common topic, but one that I'm excited to attend is White Collar Privacy: Internal Investigations and the Law. As more companies start to find security and privacy breaches, they need to smoothly and legally handle them. Often times these investigations should involve the privacy officer, but don't, or the privacy officer is not sure of their role in the process.