No more chalk vs cheese

Charles de Gaulle reportedly once jokingly asked: “How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”

 

Half a century later, business leaders are more seriously asking how they can be expected to govern a business in the face of overwhelming data privacy requirements.

 

As of February 2020, 128 of the world’s 190-plus countries had a form of data privacy legislation in place. Many businesses no longer exclusively operate in one jurisdiction. A simple web presence can take a business across territorial limits.

 

As such, business competitiveness may on the surface appear incompatible with data privacy. To borrow a British idiom, they’re like chalk and cheese.

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But de Gaulle was proud of his country’s cheese output, and the opportunities found in data privacy should be similarly celebrated.

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