About Carey

Short Bio:

Carey Lening, JD, CDPP writes, speaks, and consults on data protection, law, technology & fractal complexity in systems. Currently based in Ireland, Carey has over 20 years of experience in thinking about hard problems and helping people arrive on practical solutions. She posts her thoughts weekly on Substack, and has written for various publications since 2006.

Longer Bio:

Hi, I’m Carey Lening. I consider myself a constantly curious learner, and tend to gravitate towards trying to understand and explain the fractal complexities in law, policy, technology, and data protection/privacy.

I’ve had 20 years of experience consulting, writing, and advising on law, information security, data protection and related matters, and currently act as data protection officer and advisory consultant for a small firm in Ireland. I've previously had gigs as a tech support person, a lawyer, a journalist, a competitive intelligence researcher, and security consultant. When I'm not being a DPO, I share my thoughts on all these subjects on my blog, Privacat Insights.

Having done a bunch of weird things means that I've become quite good at looking at and tackling a problem from multiple angles and noticing things that others might miss. I’m equally at ease discussing legal nuances with lawyers and regulators, hashing out technical details with engineers and information security professionals, and presenting high-level overviews to the C-Suite. Some people think I'm witty and funny, so that helps.

I'm currently based in Ireland, and live with a very patient husband and 9 cats.

This newsletter is partly for fun, partly to share something with the world, and partly for unabashed ego gratification. Take that for what it's worth.

Feel free to subscribe if you want to get this goodness delivered into your inbox. It's the closest thing to a like button and it makes me feel special.

Why subscribe?

Let me tell you why these cats think you should subscribe.

You should subscribe if you like how my weird little brain works and want to read more of this kind of thing. You should subscribe if you’re the type of person who likes nuance, and understands that very little in the world has a simple, single solution. You should subscribe if you like your content laced with snarky humor, a little profanity, and usually at least one cat picture. If all else fails, you should subscribe if you think these cats are adorable.

If you subscribe, you’ll get full access to the newsletter and I’ll feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that people actually like what I rant about as much as I do.

Having this go to your inbox means you can be lazy about checking and you’ll never miss an issue. If you really want to show your support, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support will help me feed my rotating band of cats, and buy them toys. As a bonus to wet your appetite, here’s a picture of five of our six permanent cats.

Clockwise from the top: Joy, Kerry, Daisy, Max & Leroy. Not pictured: Octopus & the rotating collection of foster cats and kittens we take in.

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We live in a world of complex, messy systems and few simple answers. I'm curious about all of it, especially the interplay between those systems, and the people, policy & processes that influence them. Topics range, but frequently touch on law & tech.

People

Desperately trying to make sense of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. An extremely jaded, yet still hopeful, person. Lover of cats.