Data Privacy Week 2026: Navigating the New Era of Data Control

Data Privacy Week, occurring January 26-30, 2026, is an international campaign led by the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) aimed at fostering a culture of privacy and trust.

The 2026 theme, "Take Control of Your Data," highlights the fundamental right of individuals to manage their digital footprints while challenging organizations to adopt more transparent data practices. For cybersecurity professionals, Data Privacy Week serves as a critical period to align technical safeguards with the evolving ethical and regulatory expectations of global data stewardship.

Some key findings from the NCA related to the week:

• Theme focus: The 2026 campaign centers on empowering individuals to manage their personal information across websites, apps, and devices.

• Corporate imperative: Organizations must view privacy as a constant, vigilant security stance that spans every department—not just a compliance checkbox.

• Fundamental rights: Data privacy is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone for protecting human dignity, safety, and freedom of expression.

• Inventory management: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) emphasizes that a sound data security plan begins with "Taking Stock"—knowing exactly what personal information is held on all systems.

• Trust as a product: Robust privacy measures are now considered a primary brand differentiator in competitive markets where technical features are often similar.

The shift toward data agency

The core philosophy of Data Privacy Week 2026 is that individuals should have agency over how their data is collected, stored, and utilized. While it is impossible to prevent all data collection, providing users with the tools to manage their settings is essential for mitigating risks such as identity theft and fraud.

For enterprises, the "Take Control of Your Data" theme translates to a responsibility to "Respect Privacy." This involves scaling down: only collecting information that is absolutely necessary for business operations; locking down: implementing physical, administrative, and technical safeguards to protect the data that must be retained; and transparency: clearly communicating how data is used to build long-term consumer trust.

The public remains at significant risk due to the sheer volume of data generated by daily online activities. This data, ranging from financial records to physical health metrics tracked by wearable devices, can be exploited if not properly managed. Cybersecurity professionals play a vital role in educating the public on using direct links to update privacy settings on popular platforms and devices.

The NCA provides some practical takeaways for anyone looking to keep data safe:

• Become a Champion: Organizations and individuals can register as Data Privacy Week Champions to receive toolkits and materials to promote privacy awareness within their communities.

• Audit data holdings: Conduct a thorough review of all files and computers to identify what personal information is stored and why.

• Review third-party access: Verify the privacy practices of vendors and service providers who may have access to your organization's sensitive data.

• Enhance user controls: Implement clear, accessible privacy settings for customers, allowing them to opt-in or opt-out of data collection easily.

• Adopt the principle of Least Privilege: Ensure that only employees who strictly need access to personal data to perform their jobs have it.

The NCA has more webinars scheduled this week to tackle relevant topics.

There are several notifications a day and pages of news coverage of breaches of all sizes. From just the past couple of days... "Data Breach Nightmare: 149 Million Login Credentials Leaked, Including 420,000 Binance Accounts" to "Just Do It (Securely): Dissecting the Alleged Nike Data Leak" to "Hackers Are Auctioning 860GB of Source Code Stolen From Target's Development Server."

We asked experts from cybersecurity vendors for their take on the week focused on data privacy.

Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust, said:

• "Data privacy is no longer a cybersecurity business control or a risk mitigation compliance checkbox. It reflects how deeply interconnected the modern world has become between businesses, governments, travelers, and citizens. Every interaction, financial transaction, remote authentication, and geolocation ping generates personal data. That data moves across borders, clouds, applications, partners, and marketing algorithms at machine speed and far beyond what most individuals realize in terms of data broker destinations. As a result, personal data privacy is harder to achieve than at any point in history, not because of negligence, but because of scale, dependency, design, and business models design to monetize the information itself."

• "Truthfully, digital participation using anything online from smart phones to surfing the web is now the foundation for our modern life. Work, healthcare, finance, travel, education, news, and social media depend on persistent connectivity. Each service demands a user identity (even if it is a guest), authentication, filtering, context, and user behavioral telemetry to function. The more customized the experience, the more data is shared behind the scenes to present tailored content just for you. This can appear based on merchandise that you have previously viewed online all the way through news and social media based on lag times during a 'doom scrolling' session. Personal data privacy erodes not only through cybersecurity breaches, but through thousands of legitimate exchanges that aggregate into detailed digital profiles about us."

• "For almost all countries with an online presence, staying entirely off the grid is no longer realistic or potentially even possible. This starts simply at the day we are born with the electronic records of our arrival. Mobile devices, national ID systems, cloud hosted government services, and regulated digital records make participation unavoidable. Even opting out of services creates its own signal and gaps based on the shear absence of data. This draws a simple conclusion, there is no such thing as absolute data privacy, but rather what data are you willing to share? The gambit today ranges from personally identifiable information through sanitized application telemetry and the controls you have to manage granularity do not exist for all use cases."

• "Bluntly, we have an unusual challenge. Data privacy strategies have not evolved at the same pace as data creation and monetized analytics. Organizations still focus on cyber security defenses while data flows freely through APIs, SaaS platforms, AI models, and third-party ecosystems. True personal data privacy requires visibility into all of this data with control being assigned to the individual user and not the business or government entity based on regulations. Without the user knowing who and what is accessing data, why it is being accessed, and how long the data will be archived, data privacy will remain an abstract concept with individuals only loosely being able to opt of data storage and profiling. In the online world today, personal data privacy is not disappearing. It is being redefined and many users may simply be comfortable with the modern definition."

Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma Security, said:

• "As we move into 2026, data privacy priorities are evolving in two major areas. First is the need for proactive privacy controls, and second is the requirement to extend those controls into the AI systems and workflows."

• "AI privacy governance requires that organizations understand nuances such as which data sets are being used by AI models, what sensitive information employees are entering into those systems, and how that data may persist, propagate, or be reused. Privacy will become fully intertwined with AI governance. This is especially critical as agentic AI systems flatten traditional trust boundaries, creating new paths for unintended data exposure and exfiltration, a risk increasingly validated by independent research. In this environment, privacy must operate as an always-on discipline that keeps pace with AI-driven workflows, cloud scale, and continuous global data movement."

• "AI, automation, and governance now play a central role in scaling privacy responsibly. Manual processes cannot keep up with the speed and complexity of modern data environments, especially as AI systems continuously ingest, transform, and act on data. In practice, this means organizations are using automated discovery to identify sensitive data flowing into AI models, enforcing policies that restrict what employees and applications can submit to those systems, and continuously monitoring for privacy violations as models and agents evolve."

• "According to the Cisco 2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, privacy continues to be central to customer trust and business value, with 95 percent of respondents reporting that customers will not buy from them if their data is not properly protected, underscoring that strong privacy practices are tied to competitive positioning and trust."

• "Organizations that can clearly demonstrate how sensitive data is governed, monitored, and protected are better positioned to sustain customer confidence, move faster with innovation, and differentiate themselves in an environment where digital trust is increasingly fragile."

• "Globally, one of the biggest challenges we see is a widening trust gap around AI-driven data use, particularly as agentic AI systems are introduced. Executive leadership often views AI as an opportunity for speed and innovation, while security and privacy teams want to support that innovation without introducing unintended data risk. A key lesson is that closing this gap requires shared visibility into how AI systems access, move, and act on sensitive data. Without that visibility, agentic AI can unintentionally bypass traditional controls and create new paths for data exposure. If leaders align on AI-specific data risk, privacy becomes an enabler rather than a perceived barrier to growth."

Shikhar Shrestha, CEO & Co-Founder at Ambient.ai, said:

• "As AI use cases proliferate, so too does the global build-out of AI data centers. The capital investment is unprecedented, with leading AI developers committing tens of billions of dollars to new infrastructure in the United States alone. These facilities house the world’s most valuable digital assets, proprietary models, sensitive customer data, and irreplaceable intellectual property. A single physical security failure can result in consequences that are immediate, material, and irreversible."

• "Yet, the physical security model protecting many of these environments has not kept pace with the scale or complexity of the risk. Modern data centers can span hundreds of thousands of square feet, operate continuously, and face an evolving threat landscape that includes intrusion, insider risk, and coordinated attacks. Human security teams cannot manually monitor this environment in real time, nor should they be expected to. This is why the future of physical security must be AI-driven. Not AI that simply detects motion or objects, but systems built on reasoning Vision-Language Models that understand behavior, context, and intent. These systems can surface truly anomalous activity, prioritize what matters, and enable security teams to intervene before incidents escalate. The emerging operating model is human-governed and agentic. AI detects. AI triages. AI orchestrates. Humans decide and resolve."

• "On Data Privacy Day, it is important to be clear. Strong physical security does not require compromising individual privacy. In fact, the most effective modern systems are designed to protect privacy by default. They do not rely on facial recognition. They do not create biometric databases. They do not store personal identities. Processing can remain local when required, with no raw video or personal data leaving the site. The goal is to understand risk, not identify people. Infusing privacy-preserving AI into physical security infrastructure transforms security from reactive incident response into proactive incident prevention, while maintaining strict data minimization and governance standards. In an era where trust is inseparable from technology adoption, protecting critical infrastructure and respecting privacy are not competing priorities. They are inseparable requirements."

• "Data Privacy Day offers a timely reminder that safeguarding data starts well before the network perimeter. Physical security, when powered by responsible AI, is a foundational pillar of protecting intellectual property, critical systems, and the trust that underpins the digital economy."

Dana Simberkoff, Chief Risk, Privacy and Information Security Officer at AvePoint, said:

• "Building on the shared responsibility mindset that’s been widely highlighted for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Data Privacy Week draws attention to individual data ownership and designing privacy into the way we work and the systems we rely on. Personal data ownership and agency is critical both in and outside of the workplace, which is data directly tied to an identity of an individual (whether it be surrounding their being, health, finances, or person)."

• "From the CEO down to every single employee in the company, organizations must make sure that they prioritize data protection, privacy and security by design (and by default)—leading with privacy awareness when building their security practices. This ensures a sustainable future, and one that respects rights of individuals as well as protects the greater good. In practice, this means designing privacy into all workflows across the organization by default, directly into daily systems and teams so that protecting information becomes a shared responsibility rather than an afterthought. Organizations should treat employees’ personal data with the same care as their own, ensuring it is never used or collected without explicit permission."

• "However, there is no such thing as privacy without a strong data and AI governance foundation. Security teams must become privacy-aware and proactive, by using AI defensively to predict breaches before they occur rather than just reacting to them."

Russ Ernst, CTO at Blancco, said:

• "Data privacy is more important than ever. California's DROP law, which went into effect in January 2026, gives consumers the power to delete their personal data, preventing its sale by data brokers. This law and others enacted in 20 states across the U.S. are indicative of the continued focus on data privacy."

• "In addition, California is already enforcing The Delete Act, demanding more consumer control over personal data. In 2025, privacy regulators notably fined Datamasters $45,000 and barred it from selling Californians' data for trading sensitive health and demographic profiles without proper registration."

• "The proliferation of AI also has the potential to threaten data privacy because it often relies on large datasets, which can encourage organizations to collect more personal data than necessary. Without strict limits, sensitive information may be used for purposes customers never consented to, violating privacy expectations and regulations."

• "Companies have a responsibility to make sure they are not over-collecting customer data unnecessarily and using it properly. Companies must prioritize data privacy by committing to transparency, minimizing data collection, and embedding protection into every stage of the data lifecycle. This includes making sure customer data is not retained longer than legally necessary and used IT assets are properly processed using certified data erasure to mitigate the potential for data leaks and breaches."

Karl Bagci, Head of Information Security, Exclaimer:

• “Email is a key target for cyber threats, which makes data privacy an everyday operational issue, not just a security concern. In regulated industries, email governance is one of the clearest signals of data protection maturity. All it takes is one unhinged email to expose risk, no matter how strong the underlying controls, audits, or certifications may be. Data Privacy Day is a reminder for organizations to embed governance into everyday communication, as this is what turns compliance from a best-effort activity into something enforceable, auditable, and sustainable.”
• “Most data privacy failures don’t start with a breach or a sophisticated cyber-attack. They begin with everyday communication that isn’t governed, where information is shared quickly and repeatedly without consistent controls. If data protection policies don’t hold up in routine email, then those policies exist on paper rather than in practice. Data Privacy Day reminds us to adopt secure practices and protect sensitive information in every communication.”
• “Data protection isn’t a policy document or a once-a-year compliance exercise. It’s an operational discipline that shows up in every external message an organization sends. The small details, the ones most teams assume are already under control, are often where real exposure and compliance risk hide.”