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In 2025, 150 people came to the first U.S. Privacy Summit. This year, more than 250 did.
I'm still wowed by how many people showed up. And I’m also proud, because as far as I can tell: people didn’t show up for the swag, or some keynote with lasers. They came to sit in a room with regulators, litigators, and in-house privacy leaders to discuss the actual work of data privacy. A few quotes I heard last Thursday:
- “Multiple people told me today that this was the best privacy conference they attended this year, hands down.”
- “How did you get these regulators to say yes? Their sessions alone have been incredible.”
- “I know the day just started, but we want to sponsor again next year.”
- “I only had time for one conference in October, and I picked this over IAPP Seattle.” 🫢
If you were there: thank you! If you weren't, you’re in the right spot. I want to unpack:
- Why we created the U.S. Privacy Summit
- The highlights of this year’s event – sessions, activations, and attendee feedback
- What’s coming next from the U.S. Privacy Summit team
Why we built the U.S. Privacy Summit
Alysa Hutnik and I started this conference because we couldn't find the one we wanted to attend.
Plenty of privacy conferences exist. Many of them have gotten huge, and the content has gone with them: watered down, broad enough to offend no one, and light on the topics practitioners are losing sleep over.
For example: the highlights of a privacy conference are often the regulator sessions. But a 45min panel, with 5-7 regulators onstage, each answering the same questions with their rehearsed soundbites? Come on. That’s not going to get you much more substance than the average AG press release.
Here are the goals we set for the U.S. Privacy Summit:
- Real content depth. We wanted to get selfish about the session themes: what were we hearing in our customer conversations, hallway conversations, that indicated what in-house leaders are actually struggling with? What topics don’t have clear cut answers? Our priorities for 2026 included litigation, teen/kids privacy, and the intersection of AI agents and privacy – shooting for an ideal content mix of 90% education, 10% commiseration. 😉
- Relatable and impressive speakers. This goal was multifaceted. Firstly, we wanted deep-dives with regulators. Forget about the giant panel approach - who’s willing to have a 1:1, 40min conversation about their real priorities and enforcement approach? And then between those regulator sessions, let’s find brand leaders – from many types of B2B and B2C business, to ensure relatability – that will actually be transparent about their operations. And finally, I believe passionately in the importance of solid moderators. A bad moderator will fail even the best panelists, and a good one can help nervous speakers shine.
- Intimate size to encourage transparency and networking. Regulators tend to speak more plainly in smaller rooms. At 250 people, you can ask a follow-up question and get a real answer. At 2500, you get a disclaimer and a wave. Further, in a small conference setting it’s easier to be vulnerable with your fellow attendees. We wanted an environment where it feels easy to say hi and meet new professionals.
- Find a community angle. When Alysa and I came up with this idea in 2025, we knew we wanted to partner with a non-profit to host the event. We were absolutely thrilled when WISP (Women in Security & Privacy) loved the idea, and they joined us again for the 2026 Summit. Their participation also spurred our tradition of having a “new voice in privacy” introduce every panel, to encourage community support and connection for young professionals choosing a career in data privacy.
2026 U.S. Privacy Summit speakers and topics
The day ran from breakfast to a closing cocktail reception, with ten sessions in between. Here's the agenda, grouped by theme.
Regulators in a small room
Regulators from California, Colorado, and Oregon joined us, along with the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Stacey Schesser, Supervising Deputy Attorney General at the California Department of Justice, sat down for a fireside chat with Alysa Hutnik of Kelley Drye. Lara Kehoe Hoffman and Sabrina Ross of CalPrivacy talked with Alysa about office priorities, CCPA amendments, and what in-house leaders can expect. Kristen Hilton of the Oregon Department of Justice and Andrea Lowe of the Colorado Attorney General's Office covered enforcement outside California, with Paul Singer of Kelley Drye moderating. Laura Riposo VanDruff, also of Kelley Drye, closed out the regulator sessions with Annie Chiang, Deputy Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, on priorities that include kids' privacy and surveillance pricing.
Every regulator noted that they were sharing their own views and not their agency's, so I'll stay at the level of themes. A few came through clearly.
Enforcement is spreading. State teams outside California are growing, adding technologists, and building out dedicated privacy units. Several regulators came from private practice or in-house roles, and they said they can tell early in an engagement whether a company is taking privacy seriously.
Opt-outs got the most airtime, and Stacey Schesser was emphatic about them. Her team has been talking about opt-outs for six years, and she made it clear they're still important. Two points stuck with me. First, cross-device matters: an opt-out that only works on one browser or one device isn't doing the job. Second, if a company uses identity for advertising and monetization, people should get the same level of sophistication when they exercise their privacy choices and opt out.
Both points line up with how we think about consent management at Ketch.
The litigation panel
This was one of the sessions people rated most highly in the post-event survey, and I'm not surprised.
Jessica Lee of Loeb & Loeb moderated a conversation with Andrew Hall of EchoStar/DISH Media, Andy Kingman of Mariner Strategies, and Lynn Fiorentino of ArentFox Schiff. They covered the trends shaping privacy exposure this year, including surveillance pricing claims and wiretap-related suits, the legislative effort to curb that litigation, and why only part of the problem has been addressed so far. They also got into what businesses should plan for now, since a clean legislative fix isn't guaranteed.
If you've ever had to explain a demand letter to a CFO, you already know why this room was full.
Teen privacy and app store rules
The teen privacy panel brought together Katie Harrington-McBride of The Walt Disney Company, Chris Loeffler of Take-Two Interactive, and Abby Kortz from Google's Android and Play privacy team, who moderated. The focus was a growing patchwork of state teen privacy and online safety laws, and a proposal to move age verification to app stores: how age gets verified, how parental approval works, and what happens when an app store sends a developer a signal about a user's age bracket.
The practical question the panel kept returning to was what a developer actually does with that signal. Collecting age data creates its own privacy problem, and data minimization came up again and again.
AI, marketing, and data
This is the area where I think we're reaching more of the data, marketing, and tech crowd, and it showed.
The AI agents and privacy panel, moderated by Vivek Vaidya with Shanea Leven and Michelle Yi, worked through what happens to data when people use frontier models, what changes when agents start acting on a person's behalf, and how to design systems that protect data from the start.
In The AI-Powered Marketing Era, brand leaders from Clorox and former SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands (Bryant Ison and Sara Mendez Bermudez), moderated by Jon Suarez-Davis, talked about the state of the customer, agentic commerce, and what people expect when AI is doing the shopping.
I moderated New Data, New Uses, with Max Anderson from Ketch, Chris Dunlap from Expedia Group, and Kyle Kessler from Klaviyo. The question: what happens when a business wants to use data for something it wasn't collected for? We covered consent, de-identification, when data becomes sensitive, and where vendors sneak in. (Measurement vendors in ad creative came up more than once. They're easy to forget and hard to unwind.)
Closing the day
I moderated the closing takeaways panel with Kate Black and Alysa Hutnik, both Kelley Drye partners, for a recap of the day and a few favorite moments. Then Ketch Co-founder and CEO Tom Chavez wrapped up with the case for privacy as the operating system for AI. His argument: with the right foundation, privacy stops being a cost center and becomes a profit center, one that speeds up data collection, shortens time to revenue, and helps teams say yes to the business more often.
Five takeaways from the 2026 U.S. Privacy Summit
If you only read one section of this recap, make it this one.
- Expect more enforcement from more states. California gets the headlines, but teams in other states are growing fast.
- Litigation risk isn't going away on its own. Plan for the problem as it exists, not as a bill might someday change it.
- Teen privacy is now an operations problem. Age signals are arriving, so decide what your product does with them before they do.
- New uses of data need their own review. The data didn't change. The purpose did, and so did the list of vendors that touch it.
- Privacy works best when the business wants it. The strongest sessions – and businesses! – treated privacy as part of how a company grows, not a gate in front of it.
What attendees loved
Two sessions earned the top ratings of the day: the CalPrivacy panel featuring Lara Kehoe Hoffman and Sabrina Ross, and the Stacey Schesser fireside chat. People simply loved the deep-dive format with active regulators. We hope to keep producing a meaningful, top tier event that makes them want to join us again and again.
Then there's the big surprise: this year’s Opt-Out Lounge. 💜
About three weeks before the event, Alysa Hutnik came to me with an idea: what if we built a quiet space inside the conference, for every stressed privacy professional to have a zen moment? For a moment I thought, “oh my god I can’t add another thing.” But my gut told me people would love it, and we had to try. I’m no zen guru, but my colleague at Ketch, Elena Mukomelova, is as close as they come. In a few weeks, Elena came up with the idea of a small oasis with sound meditation, calming scents, soft lighting, and greenery.
It turned out to be the most talked-about aspect of the Summit. People stopped in between sessions, sat down, and took a breath. It was also a nice bit of on-brand humor: a place where you could opt out of the noise for a while.
And then there were the conversations in the hallway. A smaller format means you can actually meet the people in the room. This is the part I’m hoping to improve most for next year: intentional opportunities for seasoned and young professionals to meet.
A very good week for Ketch
A quick Ketch-specific note, because I simply can’t leave this out.
We hosted the Summit the same week we announced that Ketch is recognized as a Leader in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Privacy UX. Ketch is ranked highest for Ability to Execute and furthest for Completeness of Vision.
I'd be lying if I said that didn't make the day feel extra special. Standing in a room full of the people who care most about this work, in the same week that work got recognized, was a moment I'm not going to forget anytime soon.
To be clear, the Summit isn't a Ketch event, and I mean that. We happen to host it, but we built it to be a privacy conference for all, and that's how it ran. I'm grateful the two things happened in the same week, because it made how far we’ve come on both sides – conference growth, and platform sophistication – feel that much sweeter.
If you're curious about the report, you can read it here.
Thank you
Producing this Summit takes months of work that most people never see.
I owe a huge thanks to our co-hosts: Kelley Drye and WISP. Alysa Hutnik and her team at Kelley Drye were true partners from the first planning call through the last session. Irene Mo and the WISP team brought a community that made the room better.
We also took a big step this year: inviting the industry to sponsor our event. I can’t thank our inaugural group of sponsors enough:
- FLLR Consulting, our Presenting Sponsor. It felt like a true conference milestone to have Nik Fuller join us onstage to kick off the event and share their excitement for sponsoring the day.
- Mariner Strategies, our Social Sponsor for the closing cocktail hour. In addition to some of the best specialty cocktails I’ve seen in data privacy, Andrew Kingman lent his expertise to us as a panelist in the litigation session.
- ArentFox Schiff, our Welcome Sponsor for the VIP “night before Summit” welcome reception. Their incredible team includes Lynn Fiorentino, who joined Andrew on the excellent litigation panel.
- Myna Partners and Tillage joined us as Exhibitor Sponsors, an essential part of the networking experience. What an exciting step to see partners take the time to bring their teams, swag, and signage to support our event.
Thank you to every speaker who gave us a day, and to the Ketch team who made it run. And thank you to everyone who came.
What's next
We're already thinking about what’s next for the U.S. Privacy Summit planning team.
If you liked what you read and want to help shape future events, we'd love to include you in the planning. Tell us the topics you want covered, the speakers you want to hear from, and the format that works for you. Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
And here's a rumor, with no promises attached: we're kicking around an East Coast event in January 2027. If that's interesting to you, tell us. The more voices we hear, the better the room.
In the meantime, if you like the idea of substantive conversations with the people doing the work, that's exactly what I try to do on the Privacy Huddle podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
See you at the next one!
