Why Privacy Lawyers Are Becoming AI Lawyers: Mark Sanders at Tekion
Summary What happens to privacy lawyers when AI takes over the spotlight? In this episode of The Web Privacy Podcast, host Ethan Prete sits down with Mark Sanders, Sr Product AI & Data Privacy Counsel at Tekion, an AI native platform for car dealerships, and a 30 year veteran of in-house roles at Adobe, eBay, and Airbnb. Mark explains why the lawyers who mastered America's fragmented privacy patchwork are the best prepared to navigate AI regulation, what it looks like to work as embedded product counsel reviewing Figmas and data flows alongside engineers, and the three lens framework he uses to review every consumer facing AI agent: AI regulation, privacy, and channel specific consumer laws like TCPA and CAN-SPAM. This conversation is for privacy professionals, in-house counsel, and the analytics and marketing teams who work beside them. Chapters 00:45 Meet Mark Sanders 01:45 From digital signatures to data privacy 04:45 The shift from privacy law to AI law 06:30 Inside Tekion and the DMS space 09:00 The end of review and approve legal 13:00 Bridging the lawyer engineer language gap 18:05 Privacy through a B2B lens 20:00 The FTC and the California CARS Act 22:55 AI agents as the new privacy frontier 27:05 What keeps Mark up at night Takeaways - Embedded product counsel reviews designs and data flows before anything ships, which is cheaper and faster than the review and approve model where legal is always running behind. - Privacy lawyers who learned to navigate the fragmented US state patchwork are the best positioned professionals to handle AI regulation, which is developing the same way. - AI and privacy are concentric circles with a constantly moving overlap: you cannot have AI without data, and personal data in AI always raises privacy questions. - Every consumer facing AI agent needs a three lens review covering AI regulation, privacy, and channel laws like TCPA and CAN-SPAM that apply regardless of the technology. - AI is only as good as the data it can reach, which makes database access for AI tools the most practical privacy risk companies face right now. Connect with the Guest Mark Sanders LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msanderslaw/ Company Website: https://tekion.com Sponsor Brought to you by ObservePoint, the web governance platform that helps the world's largest enterprises see exactly what their websites are doing, and prove it. Learn more about ObservePoint: https://www.observepoint.com/