Nerd with Trust Issues

Privacy, cybersecurity, and AI governance for consumer audiences, corporate leadership, and technical teams. Keynotes and interactive workshops available across Canada and internationally. Five keynotes and workshops across privacy, cybersecurity, and AI governance.

Your Data, Your Rules: Based on the theft of Ross's own identity in 2013, this keynote walks audiences through their data rights and the practical steps that actually protect them. No jargon, no FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), no pretending the problem is bigger than it needs to be.

Mastering GRC in the Age of Unstoppable Innovation: Most governance frameworks are written for the world as it was. Racing Regulation is for organizations that need compliance to keep up with how fast the world is actually moving, covering AI governance, shadow IT, and building policy structures that adapt rather than block.

Key Risque Indicators: This one-of-a-kind keynote takes governance, risk, and compliance off the spreadsheet and onto the stage. Literally. As a different type of podium rises on stage, so does a new way of thinking about the risks and controls that shape organizational decisions. This is not a slide deck. It is a live experience, built move by move, where the theory and the physicality unfold together in real time. Along the way, we challenge a few assumptions: about what risk looks like, about where resilience comes from, and about how the most powerful frameworks began at the margins, pioneered by people who were dismissed, doubted, and underestimated, before the rest of the world caught up.

Privacy Debt - The Refactor You Didn't Budget For: Privacy is a development problem. Most engineering teams just don't know it yet, because the contracts that created those obligations sit in folders that Legal and Sales own. This keynote maps exactly where privacy intersects with the development lifecycle, using real scenarios and war stories from teams that found out the hard way.

Don't LEAN on Legal - Why Privacy is a Product Discipline: Many teams expect privacy to be handled by the security program or covered by legal and compliance. The reality is that privacy obligations often exist in contracts the product team has never seen, and they need to be built into the product lifecycle long before Legal gets involved. Across Research, Design, Development, Testing, Launch, and Operations, there are privacy considerations that shape product quality. The earlier they're addressed, the less they cost when a user exercises their rights, a design challenge emerges, or the product scales.

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Learning Lunches, Team Workshops, and Bespoke Training also available.

Twenty years in technology have not made Ross Saunders more trusting, but they have made him harder to fool.

A self-proclaimed Nerd with Trust Issues, Ross is a Toronto-based privacy and cybersecurity consultant and keynote speaker. His career started in IT support and moved through network architecture, software development, early cloud infrastructure, and product and engineering leadership for SaaS companies across multiple countries. He became the person who could explain what the technology actually does to the people who need to act on it, which turned out to be a useful thing to be when privacy law started having opinions about software.

There is a more personal reason he takes this work seriously. He will tell you that story on stage.

For the past 15 years, he has worked in privacy, cybersecurity, and technology risk. His keynotes and workshops replace compliance anxiety with practical clarity. No fear-mongering. No jargon. The kind of direct, plain-language conversation that leaves people feeling capable rather than overwhelmed, for audiences ranging from software engineering teams to boards of directors.

CIPP/E certified (IAPP), with credentials in ethical hacking, data analytics, and paralegal practice, he holds a Master of Science in Management of Technology and Innovation, Cum Laude, President's Award, from the Davinci Institute. He serves on the National Board of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers and is a Past-President of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa.

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