Why privacy professionals should care about post-quantum cryptography
The IAPP is directing privacy professionals' attention to post-quantum cryptography, signaling that the transition away from current encryption standards is a concern relevant beyond security engineers. Quantum computing advances are expected to eventually break widely used encryption, putting long-stored sensitive data at risk.
Why this matters: Most privacy work assumes that encrypted data is protected data. Post-quantum computing breaks that assumption. Data collected today can be stored by adversaries and decrypted later, once the computing power exists. That includes health records, financial data, legal communications, anything transmitted now. Privacy professionals do not need to become cryptographers, but they do need to know which systems rely on encryption that will not hold. The organizations that wait for a crisis to care about this will not have time to fix it.
Who should care: General readers · Privacy officers · Policy
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