Privacy requirements for a financial services company get complicated, which is why Elise Houlik loves a good whiteboard—a place to draw the customer data being pulled, where it’s going, and what controls are in place to protect it.

Maybe one box represents employer data, then an arrow shows that information heading to a new insight tool, and then a separate box illustrates the data getting de-identified, with names and locations taken out.

“You get me some dry-erase markers, I’m off to the races,” said Houlik, chief privacy officer at Intuit.

The 40-plus-year-old company behind familiar services like TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma relies on a combination of sensitive, sometimes personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers and addresses.

Safeguarding the privacy of that data requires more than a few markers. Houlik is charged with not only protecting the data, but translating the privacy complexities—both technical and regulatory—to employees.

“I wouldn’t expect everybody to walk around with an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different global privacy laws…That’s why I have a team. That’s why we’re around,” said Houlik.

Data difficulty. One of the perks (and challenges) of having a 100-million-plus customer base: there’s a lot of data.

When an Intuit product team has an idea that harnesses the mountain of information, a team member may be tempted to use, well, all of it. A common question, said Houlik: Why can’t I do this with this set of data?

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Open source technology reigns supreme for developers who by and large view it as having a positive impact on society, according to a recent Stack Overflow pulse survey. Coming in near the bottom on both rankings? Low-code/no-code development tools and blockchain.

Stack Overflow asked around 2,000 developers to rate various technologies based on whether they were proven, predicted to soon be in everyday use, and if the respondents thought the tech would have a positive or negative impact on the world. The developer Q&A site also asked respondents what technologies they wanted hands-on training with.

Those technologies respondents ranked as the most proven, as measured by a mean score out of 10, are in widespread commercial use on a large scale: open source (6.9), cloud computing (6.5), machine learning (5.9), robotics (5.7), internet of things (5.7), and 3D printing (5.6).

At the bottom of the barrel:

• Blockchain (4.8)
• InnerSource approaches (4.7)
• Low-code/no-code (4.6)
• Nanotechnology (4.5)
• Quantum computing (3.7)

“Developers are curious and skeptical, which is an amazing combination to have, because there’s an enthusiasm that comes through when there’s new technologies,” Joy Cicman Liuzzo, VP of product marketing at Stack Overflow, told IT Brew. “But there’s also a high level of ‘prove it’ that comes through when they’re evaluating technologies.”

Keep reading here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Tech job postings dropped slightly in February, but don’t look at that slip as indicative of a weaker market—IT sector hiring is still where it’s at.

CompTIA chief technology evangelist James Stanger told IT Brew that he sees the current drop as part of a return to the mean, but that’s not a bad thing: “We’ve been in record territory…in terms of hiring.”

“Even though there has been a lowering, it’s a regression to a mean that…probably [existed] around 2018 or so,” Stanger said. “And we’re not even down to that level, nowhere near it—and even the 2018 level was incredibly high.”

A CompTIA analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that IT worker unemployment rose to 2.2%, still lower than the national level of 3.6%.

As IT Brew reported last month, while jobs are being shed in traditionally tech-heavy regions like Silicon Valley, East Coast cities like New York and Washington, DC, are becoming IT hubs. Stanger told IT Brew that’s largely because of the expanding role of tech in government and industry. Those trends will lead to an increase in jobs based around cybersecurity, compliance, and the like in areas and industries around the country.

“For the last 30 years, the tech sector was like Silicon Valley,” Stanger said. “We’re so far removed from that kind of thinking now, in terms of how technology is used.”

Keep reading here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 42%. That’s the number of IT professionals who said they’d been told to keep quiet about a data breach, according to a survey from the cybersecurity company Bitdefender. (VentureBeat)

Quote: “I wish Gallup would do a poll on how many people think Terminator was a documentary.”—James Lewis, SVP at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on recent research revealing Americans fear cyberattacks more than nuclear ones (The Hill)

Read: Tax scams are out there. Make sure you know this year’s “dirty dozen” schemes. (IRS)

Speedy and sustainable: Want to power your next web project with renewable energy? Check out IONOS. Get streamlined hosting for your git-based sites and apps, plus worry-free WordPress hosting when you future-proof your IT infrastructure.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}