Beyond Compliance: Mastering Privacy and Trust Resilience in 2025
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May 22, 2025
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Data is the lifeblood of organizations, fueling innovation, customer engagement and growth. As new threats emerge, prioritizing privacy resilience becomes imperative to safeguarding data as a vital resource and helping ensure long-term success. Beyond regulatory compliance, privacy has emerged as a fundamental cornerstone of engaging digital experiences. As immersive technologies advance and digital touchpoints multiply, organizations increasingly recognize that privacy-centric design isn’t merely a legal obligation — it’s essential to building the trust that powers meaningful customer relationships.
Keeping pace with regulatory, consumer and shareholder expectations for data privacy, organizations face the perfect storm of privacy challenges amidst a rapidly evolving landscape in 2025. Twenty states1 are now enforcing comprehensive privacy legislation, while state attorneys general are ramping up enforcement efforts,2 and privacy-related class actions are surging with novel legal theories being tested across jurisdictions.3
The Evolving Privacy Risk Landscape
Cases under the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”) and wiretap laws increasingly scrutinize ad tech companies over data tracking and interception practices. Organizations face significant risks when their websites contain pixels transmitting user data without proper consent — often unaware of all tracking technologies deployed across their digital estate. Under GDPR and U.K. frameworks, organizations remain liable for the actions of partners with whom they share controller status. Even when an organization maintains compliance, joint controllers’ failures can trigger regulatory investigations directed at the organization’s operations.4 Violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and mishandling of sensitive health information are also leading to enforcement actions and legal challenges.5 With regulatory and legal pressure mounting, organizations must stay ahead of growing compliance risks.
Enter two essential concepts: privacy resilience and trust resilience. Organizations that master these principles stand to reduce the risk of crises but also secure a competitive edge through enhanced consumer loyalty and sustained growth in an increasingly privacy-conscious market.
Privacy resilience is an organization’s ability to withstand, adapt and recover from adverse privacy events, whether regulatory inquiries or enforcement, legislation, lawsuits or public scrutiny. It encompasses more than just strong data protection mechanisms; it includes flexibility — the capacity to adapt to new regulations, technologies and unforeseen incidents with minimal disruption.
Trust resilience involves maintaining and regaining stakeholder trust through consistent actions and transparent practices. During and following crises, organizations with strong trust foundations retain loyalty and support. A 2024 study found that 94% of organizations say their customers won’t buy from them if data is not properly protected.6
These concepts are deeply interconnected. When organizations face privacy scandals, both their practices and transparency come under scrutiny. Consider the messaging missteps when organizations discover analytics trackers that are transmitting sensitive user information to third parties without proper consent. Organizations that immediately respond with “we take privacy seriously” platitudes while failing to address the specific concern often amplify the crisis. As the saying goes, the coverup is often worse than the crime. When the public, along with regulators, media and lawmakers, feel deceived, trust is lost, which can lead to loss of customers, diluted loyalty and other long-term consequences.
Why Organizations Need to Invest in Privacy and Trust Resilience
Privacy Failures Directly Impact Organizational Value in the Following Ways.
Direct Revenue Impact
Immersive digital experiences, from augmented shopping interfaces to personalized financial dashboards, now generate significant portions of organizational revenue. When privacy failures compromise these experiences, revenue immediately suffers.
Customer Acquisition Costs
As privacy awareness grows, the cost to acquire privacy-conscious customers increases substantially for organizations with questionable privacy reputations.
Adapting to New Laws and Regulations
Continually changing and emerging laws and regulations, particularly those related to artificial intelligence, necessitate operational adjustments for organizations. Such changes can slow processes, delay strategic initiatives (such as multi-billion dollar mergers and acquisitions) and subject an organization’s privacy practices to heightened regulatory scrutiny.
Regulations like the EU AI Act introduce requirements, including risk assessments, documentation, transparency measures and ongoing reporting requirements. These requirements place increased pressure and resource demands on privacy stakeholders, legal, business teams, IT, customer operations and risk management teams. Taking a holistic approach to managing digital risk is crucial for minimizing regulatory change impacts.
Managing the Loss of Vendors Critical to Business Operations
Many organizations rely on numerous technology partnerships to deliver seamless digital experiences. These essential relationships require strategic governance to ensure that privacy commitments extend across the entire data processing chain. The sudden loss of a critical vendor’s functionality can result in service disruption and subsequently damage reputations.
Effective risk mitigation programs should address all scenarios where access to personal information may be compromised, not only technical failures. These can include situations such as vendor insolvency, legal disputes or litigations, regulatory non-compliance or situations where a vendor is acquired by another company, the new owner may change terms of service which could result in restricted access to data or re-negotiation of data access rights. Organizations should establish robust contingency plans, including data redundancy, alternative vendor agreements and privacy crisis preparedness plans to proactively address and practice responses to potential disruptions.
Countering Activist Pressure Campaigns
Activist campaigns pose another challenge. For example, these groups can overwhelm an organization with data subject access requests and complaints to regulators, disrupting operations and challenging the legitimacy of data processing practices. Activists are also known to engage media – sending reporters leads on organizations they feel don’t take issues like data privacy as seriously as they should.
Companies often underfund DSAR support functions, leaving them vulnerable when facing coordinated campaigns or complex requests with legal implications. Organizations must develop capabilities to spot and appropriately triage potentially legally sensitive DSARs, distinguishing between routine requests and those that may signal broader challenges. This requires not only adequate staffing and technology but also cross-functional protocols that engage legal and communications teams early when high-risk patterns emerge. Prepare ahead of time to succinctly explain the organization’s data privacy policies in a way that highlights commitments to privacy and trust and provide appropriate supporting evidence to demonstrate that data protection measures have been carried out.
Preparing for Lawsuits and Government Investigations
In the face of potential lawsuits and government investigations, organizations need to be proactive. This includes documenting robust privacy policies, establishing clear response plans, maintaining strong data management procedures and ensuring effective communication and stakeholder engagement to manage risk and maintain trust. Demonstrating a good data privacy stewardship is easier when proactive measures are in place, allowing organizations to defend their practices effectively under scrutiny.
Privacy and trust resilience work hand in hand. By maintaining agility in privacy, an organization can preserve public confidence in its ability to do right by its customers, partners and employees.
Steps Toward Resilience
The path to privacy and trust resilience begins with honest leadership conversations about readiness, culture and objectives. Developing a multidisciplinary resilience plan is essential, incorporating technical, legal and communication strategies to ensure comprehensive preparedness. This means engaging in frank discussions about the organization’s current capabilities, potential vulnerabilities, emerging legislation trends and aligning privacy compliance with broader business objectives. Leaders need to assess whether their existing practices pose gaps that could expose the organization to unnecessary risks.
Investing in privacy and trust resilience is not just a defensive measure; it is a strategic imperative. By building robust, flexible privacy capabilities and maintaining trust through transparency and proactive planning, organizations are better positioned to navigate crises and thrive in an evolving regulatory and market landscape. Forward-thinking leaders recognize that privacy and trust resilience aren’t merely risk management functions — they’re essential components of a robust business strategy in the digital age.
1: C Kibby, “US State Privacy Legislation Tracker,” IAPP (April 7, 2025).
2: Carrie Cohen, Boris Segalis, Katherine Wang, “A year in review: Privacy, data security enforcement by New York’s attorney general,” IAPP (March 4, 2025).
3: Mike Scarcella, “US judge approves ‘novel’ Clearview AI class action settlement,” Reuters (March 21, 2025).
4: Katerina Tassi, Ruth Boardman, “The CJEU rules on the liability of controllers,” IAPP (January 4,2024).
5: Erin Whaley, Brent Hoard, Emma Trivax, “New legal developments herald big changes for HIPAA compliance in 2025,” Reuters (April 7, 2025).
6: “Cisco 2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study,” Cisco (last accessed April 11, 2025).
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