Information governance is a growing area of career opportunity for Bermudians, the island’s Privacy Commissioner said on Tuesday at a meeting of privacy professionals at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

The 45th Global Privacy Assembly, which was held on the island for the first time this week, attracted about 350 delegates, more than 250 of whom were from off-island. It included a number from public offices in 40 countries, representing all seven continents.

Alexander White leads the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Bermuda, an independent public office with a mandate to regulate the use of personal information by organisations in a manner which recognises both the need to protect the rights of individuals in relation to their personal information and the need for organisations to use personal information for legitimate purposes, among other duties, in accordance with the 2016 Personal Information Protection Act.

Pipa is set to come into effect on January 1, 2025.

Mr White said: “The most important resource any office can have, whether it’s a regulatory office or someone in the private sector, is the people that you have at the office.

“You want them to have the appropriate skills, training and support so that they can accomplish what they need. That’s why we’ve made such an effort to try to engage the business community in order to provide these kinds of trainings, to help develop that army of privacy officers that we’re going to need to make Pipa happen.”

He added: “I said very early on that I see this as a boom industry potentially, an area where Bermudians cannot only find a niche that they can go into similar to the way Bermudians have focused on accounting, or regulation, or compliance, or things like that, but it’s something that would be applicable and transferable to all kinds of places and industries.”

Mr White was speaking after the panel discussion, Risk is our Business, featuring Naomi Lefkovitz, senior privacy policy adviser, Information Technology Lab, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce; Emma Martins, data protection commissioner, Guernsey; Anu Talus, Commissioner Finland and chairwoman of the European Data Protection Board; and Mar de Espana, director, Spanish Data Protection Agency.

The panel was moderated by Trevor Hughes, president and chief executive of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Ms Lefkovitz, speaking of the complexity of the work, said: “I went to a dinner and the head of privacy for Microsoft said ‘risk management requires creativity and intelligence’ and so the quality of the people that you have, the workforce, is critical.”