What if you had all the resources you needed to build a proactive privacy and security program from the ground up? Not just the funding, but the talent, the time, the tech, and the all-important C-suite buy-in. Imagine how much easier everything would be, with privacy built right into the development lifecycle to make your products and services more robust without slowing you down.
At TerraTrue, that’s not just a hypothetical — it’s how we were founded. Back in 2014, our founding team was at Snap, an innovative social media company that was churning out software at breakneck speed. Google veteran Jad Boutros (Chief Security Officer) and Chris Handman (General Counsel) were brought on to make privacy right in the early days of Snap(chat).
Snap’s leadership determined to put their users' privacy first and committed themselves to building a scalable privacy program that could enhance the product offering rather than derailing it. To back up that commitment, they invested in a talented team, capable of accomplishing the seemingly impossible.
From Spreadsheets to SaaS
Snap was a trial by fire for TerraTrue co-founders Jad Boutros and Chris Handman, and the rest of the privacy team. The team was going through several thousand privacy reviews a year, tracking each feature manually in a Google spreadsheet that grew to over 100 tabs.
At the time, that was pretty much the cutting-edge — there weren’t off-the-shelf tools available to streamline privacy and security review management. To keep the privacy team ahead of production, Snap’s only option was to pay for a big team to compensate for those inefficiencies. It took a few years, but Jad and Chris were able to get Snap’s privacy system working like a well-oiled machine, enabling privacy and security stakeholders to work frictionlessly with engineers, execs, and PMs to ship a great product.
But outside of Snap, privacy teams were still struggling with outdated privacy programs, using inflexible questionnaires and templates, tracked by overburdened spreadsheets to try to manage privacy. This approach trapped companies in a reactive posture, forcing them to play catch up with every new privacy regulation rather than being proactive by design. Our founders knew there had to be a better way to tackle regulatory risk without disrupting productivity. So they set out to bring the success they’d built at Snap to the world, and TerraTrue was born.
Putting Privacy in Everything
What we built was a complete solution to the problem of privacy, security, and compliance. Our product offering uses a single platform and a unified framework to fully integrate privacy and security into your organization’s day-to-day functioning, from ensuring new products hit compliance goals, to mitigating risk in third-party onboarding and the vendor management lifecycle, to high level tasks like strategic planning. And we handle perhaps the most difficult task of all for you: keeping up with a changing regulatory and technical environment. This empowers customers to be proactive and strategic, cutting costs and eliminating disruption by investing in privacy and security ahead of time. That means you can be fully prepared for the next new law or enforcement decision while your competition is still struggling to wrap their head around it.
The key is our approach to Information, Workflow, and Technology.
Information
Every year, the regulatory landscape becomes more complex and difficult to navigate. In 2024, three new comprehensive privacy laws have already come into effect in the United States alone in Florida, Oregon, and Texas. That brings the total to 24 states with comprehensive privacy laws active or in the legislature, with multiple laws under consideration in several states.
And if that’s not enough, Europe has just opened up a whole new area of regulatory compliance with the EU AI law. In addition to prohibiting applications in areas like predictive policing, social scoring, and emotional recognition, the law also burdens businesses with complex new requirements for scoring and mitigating AI risks, upholding copyright law, training AI models, cybersecurity, and other areas. And with potential fines up to 35 million euros or 7% of global revenue (whichever is higher), businesses can't afford a "wait and see" approach.
With TerraTrue, you always have the information you need to stay ahead of the curve. Our software develops in step with the regulatory climate seamlessly integrating guidance on new compliance regimes, changing best practices, and new technologies like AI and ML, updating our guidance faster than anybody. That means while your competitors are spending time trying to get their head around the latest developments, your compliance team will already be implementing them.
Workflow
Information is only as useful as the workflow that supports it. Outdated, document-centric review practices and clunky, ad-hoc workflows make even routine compliance tasks slow and difficult, and increase the likelihood of costly mistakes. Without enough visibility across departments, workflows can grow into unwieldy Frankenstein's monsters, with new parts grafted on with little rhyme or reason.
That’s why TerraTrue has prioritized seamless workflows from day one. PMs can fill out a launch in just a few minutes at the start of a project, giving your review teams everything they need to quickly review it against privacy, security, and compliance goals. Approvals, change recommendations, and reviews flow back and forth through a single system, which tracks every step, making it easy for team members (and auditors) to catch up.
TerraTrue also enables you to grow, optimize, and organize your workflow with your needs. A no-code UI means that however complex the regulatory landscape gets, your workflow remains simple and elegant. Instead of struggling to fit the pieces together, you can build sophisticated, risk-based automation so your team can hone in on the critical reviews that matter the most.
And with everything flowing seamlessly through a single platform, your team can collaborate without limits. Product and engineering can work easily with privacy and security teams, without the need for frequent catch-up meetings or the need to chase down missing signatures or reviews. That means you can better manage and mitigate risk before launching new products and features, while saving time and cutting cost.
Technology
TerraTrue is your trust co-pilot. As an early adopter of AI and ML, we’re leading the industry in privacy and security automation. Every aspect of our system is designed to minimize repetitive work and maximize efficiency, including:
- Automated document scanning to distill critical information
- Smart forms that learn your company’s needs with every use, and make the next review that much faster and more accurate
- Cutting-edge vendor management to mitigate risk throughout your data ecosystem
The technology also lets you use employee expertise more effectively by guiding you through every step of every process in the same way tax preparation software does. Instead of having to waste a lot of time learning the system, your stakeholders can hit the ground running.
The simplicity and user-friendliness of our workflow forms a powerful synergy with our sophisticated Data Catalog and comprehensive data integration. TerraTrue integrates with all leading enterprise data sources, providing complete visibility into the data you store and the way you use it. The Data Map enables you to survey your entire data landscape at a glance, so you can quickly spot and mitigate risky data practices. And because you can see exactly where your data is and how it's organized, time and resource-intensive processes like Data Subject Access Requests become quick and easy to execute.
Our strong focus on technology also lets you solve complex workflow issues. TerraTrue integrates with back-office systems, contract lifecycle management tools, productivity tools, engineering tools and more, right out of the box. Instead of having to rework your workflow to fit the privacy and compliance technology, you can integrate TerraTrue into the way your teams already work and streamline review management.
That means an end to bottlenecks and busy work, without sacrificing security, quality, or the workflow your team depends on. Your privacy and production teams can finally work in complete harmony, bringing secure, high-quality products to market faster than the competition.
Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
Our system goes beyond incremental benefits, truly revolutionizing your privacy program.
Address compliance concerns before they become problems
In privacy and security management, spotting a problem early makes all the difference. TerraTrue identifies and flags potential conflicts with your company’s privacy obligations and goals as soon as documents enter the system, giving your privacy team all the tools they need to address them.
That lets you implement needed changes while you’re still in the planning stage, potentially saving hundreds of hours in remediation, expensive compliance penalties, and damage to your reputation just by tweaking the plan.
Save time and money everywhere
TerraTrue saves money on virtually everything your privacy team does. Instead of digging through documentation for routine privacy reviews, your counsel starts with all the information they need in a single view, along with concise, actionable guidance.
Vendor management is streamlined in the same way. Your team can see your whole data landscape at a glance, along with each vendor’s role in it. Vendors can be qualified and sorted based on compliance requirements and organization-specific priorities, ensuring sensitive data only goes to vendors you can trust.
And as for audits, all the data you need is just a few clicks away. That makes it easy to show regulators, and third-party auditors everything your company does to protect security and privacy, without the work (and stress!) of gathering and organizing the data by hand.
Secure and Private by Design
As the privacy and security industry matures, and regulatory standards get stricter, protecting consumer rights is becoming an increasingly important competitive advantage. TerraTrue provides a complete system of trust for your organization, enabling you to ensure privacy in a comprehensive way you couldn’t before. That means you can get ahead and stay ahead, building privacy-by-design while your competitors learn their lessons the hard way.
Regulatory pressure is growing
Recent years have seen record-breaking settlements by companies for compliance violations. Finance and fintech have continued to see a large share of massive fines and complex settlements. But as regulators have honed in on privacy and consumer rights, industries like entertainment and manufacturing have been facing much stiffer penalties as well.
In Europe, TikTok was fined €345 million for unlawfully processing children’s data, while American regulators fined Epic Games, makers of Fortnight, $275 million and forced them to give another $245 million in refunds for violating children’s privacy and using dark patterns to trick users into unwanted purchases.
In other words, you can face massive enforcement actions for issues that may not be on your company’s radar. Companies can get so focused on optimizing for conversion or trying to get the most value out of customer data that they miss the point at which those practices cross the line. It’s not a cheap mistake to make. You could potentially face hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, in addition to the cost of lost consumer trust or remediation.
In this environment, privacy-by-design is more than a risk mitigation tool: it’s a major differentiator. Companies that can show regulators and consumers that they take privacy seriously will reap the rewards, not just in lowered risk, but in consumer loyalty as well.
That’s why TerraTrue is the choice of privacy-first companies, from traditionally high-risk industries like finance, healthcare, security, to forward-thinking manufacturing, entertainment, and media companies facing high reputational risks and an increasingly strict enforcement landscape.
Finance and Fintech
The finance industry dedicates huge amounts of money to privacy, security, and compliance. Finance industry compliance spend is increasing by over $50 billion annually in the US alone, with large institutions spending as much as $10,000 per employee! That’s over 60% more than pre-financial crisis spending.
And yet the compliance fines keep on growing. While the novelty of Crypto exchange prosecutions, such as the recent $4.3 billion Binance fine and CEO prison sentence have garnered the most attention, some of the biggest fines have gone to traditional financial institutions. JP Morgan Chase was fined almost $40 billion — nearly ten times the Binance penalty — over the last two decades, including a $13.46 billion fine for toxic securities abuse.
TerraTrue helps both traditional financial services and digital native fintech companies eliminate the blindspots that lead to these violations by building a unified approach to compliance. Instead of wading through endless piecemeal tools to handle each region and subsector individually, you can get a complete picture of your compliance posture at a glance. Potential violations and risks are flagged automatically, with a customizable workflow that brings relevant stakeholders together to quickly fix the problem.
And with a complete, automated audit log, it’s easy to prove that you’ve put in the work to exceed your privacy, security, and ethical obligations.
Manufacturing and entertainment
Consumer manufacturing and entertainment companies have faced increasing regulatory pressure in recent years, particularly around children’s privacy issues. Laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) have led to huge enforcement rulings, like the record-setting €1.2 billion Meta fine over Facebook privacy practices.
But it’s not just digital natives that are on the hook. Older toy manufacturers like Mattel and Hasbro and legacy entertainment companies like Viacom have faced substantial fines for tracking children’s online activity without obtaining parental permission. And as the recent TikTok and Epic games fines show, the penalties are going up and up.
The challenge for these companies is to reach young consumers online without violating their privacy rights. Mattel recently concluded a major ad deal with a vendor to target under 13 viewers online, accelerating an ongoing trend towards outsourcing digital marketing.
That makes effective vendor management more important than ever. If a company fails to adequately protect childrens’ data, they can face hefty compliance fines and reputation damage, and the consequences are only going to increase.
TerraTrue empowers companies to ensure their customer data is protected, both internally and throughout the vendor ecosystem. Organizations can see a complete map of their data ecosystem at a glance, then drill down to the vendor level. Questionnaires, certifications, audits, and other reviews are all organized in a single database, making it easy to verify your vendors are up to the task of protecting your most sensitive data, and replace risky vendors before they can harm your reputation or your budget.
Contact us to learn more about how TerraTrue can help your company become a privacy leader
