David Fraser has 2 posts on his Canadian Privacy Law Blog that together emphasize that to be effective, an organization’s privacy officer must have support at the highest levels of the organization, and must be able to influence various areas within the organization.

The first is a study that found that 87% of data breaches are the result of incompetence and carelessness.

The second is a study that shows there is a large disconnect between marketing departments and those charged with overseeing privacy compliance. It showed that if you ask privacy executives and marketing executives about limitations on sharing personal information, the privacy executives thought they were doing far less sharing than the marketing executives did.

One scary aspect of this is that it suggests that while privacy policies are well intentioned – internal compliance with them can sometimes be questionable.