About

For over 25 years, Linnette Attai has been building organizational cultures of compliance and guiding clients through the complex obligations governing data privacy, user safety, and marketing. As founder of the global compliance consulting firm PlayWell, LLC, Linnette provides strategic advising, with a focus on privacy and marketing regulation and industry self-regulation, compliance capacity-building, monetization models, policy development, incident response, and government relations. She serves as virtual chief privacy officer and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data protection officer to select clients across all sectors, is a recognized expert in youth and education privacy, and speaks nationally on data privacy matters.

Linnette is a TEDx speaker (April 2019) and the author of the books “Student Data Privacy: Building a School Compliance Program,” “Protecting Student Data Privacy: Classroom Fundamentals,” and “Student Data Privacy: Managing Vendor Relationships,”all published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Linnette created an FTC-approved Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) safe harbor program.  She has also advised the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) on compliance issues, helping to write their guidelines on children’s advertising and leading a subcommittee on children’s privacy.

Prior to founding PlayWell, Linnette served as Vice President, Standards & Practices for Nickelodeon, where she developed and managed compliance policies and practices for all lines of business, overseeing company compliance with COPPA, the FCC’s Children’s Television Act, advertising regulation and industry self-regulation.  She has also served as a compliance executive with CBS and IAC.

Linnette often presents to developers, marketers, researchers and attorneys about privacy, safety and advertising concerns, including compliant innovation, monetization models and user engagement. Noteworthy engagements include:  National Association of Attorneys General Presidential Initiative on Privacy Summit (2013), Software & Information Industry Association Education Industry Summit (2014, 2015), International Association of Privacy Professionals Global Privacy Summit (2015, 2016, 2019), Cleveland Marshall College of Law Cybersecurity Summit (Keynote 2017), Federal Trade Commission and US Department of Education Student Privacy and Ed Tech Workshop (2017), Future of Education Technology Conference (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020), Ohio Education Technology Conference (Keynote 2018), TEDxCUNY (2019), and Future of Privacy Forum Education Summit (2021).

In addition, Linnette has served as an adjunct professor of marketing at The New School, and as an adjunct professor of marketing at the Fordham Graduate School of Business where she taught a course she designed on ethical marketing to millennials and young consumers.

Linnette is a member of the Ithaca College Cybersecurity Certificate Program Advisory Board and the Leadership Council for Bottom Line in New York City.