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My nearly 2 decades at Google as its Global Privacy Counsel has ended. I’ve left Google as one of the last few remaining members of the original early Google team. Google asked me to update social media profiles accordingly, hence my coming back to this dormant blog to say I’ve left Google. Together with me, other senior members of the Google privacy team have left in recent months.
My career started as Google’s first full-time privacy professional, building a function, and later team, that didn’t exist before. My job was to try to make Google respect privacy for its billions of users. You can judge the results, but I am proud of the mission. Being a privacy leader is a tough job at a company like that.
The early years at Cool Google were fun, creative, innovative, comradely, and I loved them. But Google has changed and evolved into Corporate Google, and large committees can now carry forward the work I did, or reverse them; in either case, it’s no longer my business.
I left on good terms. No one is in jail now for privacy, including me, and I’m hardly being flippant, speaking as one of those rare privacy professionals who was arrested and sentenced to jail for their employer’s privacy practices. And I helped build the small company I joined into the largest private processor and monetizer of personal data on the planet. I can’t think of another privacy professional who helped build their data-processing company from the early days to 2 trillion + market cap. What a ride.
I will remain active in the field of privacy in many ways. AI will present existential challenges to the field of privacy, as to so many other domains, and I’m eager to find ways to help organizations develop AI responsibly. And there are innovators out there who remind me of the fun, creative, responsible environment of my early years at Google, as we wrestled with privacy issues and the then-new online world. Unless compelled by law to testify, I won’t reveal any non-public information about Google: I’ll respect my confidentiality constraints as a lawyer to my former client/employer.
I relish my newfound freedom to share my insights and experience with others in the field and in new ways. More on that soon. In the meantime, I wish luck to my former colleagues with MAGA: Make Alphabet Great Again.
