
Fiona has been a data protection officer, or DPO, in Singapore since 2018.
As she shares in a video interview with DPEX Network, she fell into this role by chance, as she had worked in a different role at her previous organisation.
“How I came into this line was actually by coincidence,” said Fiona, who is currently a DPO with a Singapore organisation.
At her previous employer, a risk assessment exercise flagged up data protection as one of the “big risks” that surfaced.
“So I actually volunteered myself for [a data protection] role,” she said, “because of bandwidth issues. I did not know that [this would] actually branch me out into a new career.”
“When I started, I knew nothing about PDPA (the Personal Data Protection Act), not even knowing what that was.”