The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

In this episode, I'm joined by Amalia Barthel, founder of Designing Privacy, a consultancy that  helps businesses integrate privacy into business operations; and Eric Lybeck, a seasoned independent privacy engineering consultant with over two decades of experience in cybersecurity and privacy. Eric recently served as Director of Privacy Engineering at Privacy Code. Today, we discuss: the importance of more training for privacy engineers on AI system enablement; why it's not enough for privacy professionals to solely focus on AI governance; and how their new hands-on course, "Privacy Engineering in AI Systems Certificate program," can fill this need.

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Today, I chat with Gianclaudio Malgieri, an expert in privacy, data protection, AI regulation, EU law, and human rights. Gianclaudio is an Associate Professor of Law at Leiden University, the Co-director of the Brussels Privacy Hub, Associate Editor of the Computer Law & Security Review, and co-author of the paper "The Unfair Side of Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Addressing the Trade-offs Between PETs and Fairness". In our conversation, we explore this paper and why privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are essential but not enough on their own to address digital policy challenges.

Gianclaudio explains why PETs alone are insufficient solutions for...

In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Avi Bar-Zeev, a true tech pioneer and the Founder and President of The XR Guild. With over three decades of experience, Avi has an impressive resume, including launching Disney's Aladdin VR ride, developing Second Life's 3D worlds, co-founding Keyhole (which became Google Earth), co-inventing Microsoft's HoloLens, and contributing to the Amazon Echo Frames. The XR Guild is a nonprofit organization that promotes ethics in extended reality (XR) through mentorship, networking, and educational resources. 

Throughout our conversation, we dive into privacy concerns in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (V...

Today, I'm joined by Matt Gershoff, Co-founder and CEO of Conductrics, a software company specializing in A/B testing, multi-armed bandit techniques, and customer research and survey software. With a strong background in resource economics and artificial intelligence, Matt brings a unique perspective to the conversation, emphasizing simplicity and intentionality in decision-making and data collection.

In this episode, Matt dives into Conductrics' background, the role of A/B testing and experimentation in privacy, data collection at a specific and granular level, and the details of Conductrics' processes. He emphasizes the importance of intentionally collecting data with a...

In this episode, Marie Potel-Saville joins me to shed light on the widespread issue of dark patterns in design. With her background in law, Marie founded the 'FairPatterns' project with her award-winning privacy and innovation studio, Amurabi, to detect and fix large-scale dark patterns. Throughout our conversation, we discuss the different types of dark patterns, why it is crucial for businesses to prevent them from being coded into their websites and apps, and how designers can ensure that they are designing fair patterns in their projects.

Dark patterns are interfaces that deceive or manipulate users into...

In this episode, I sat down with Aaron Weller, the Leader of HP's Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE), focused on providing technical solutions for privacy engineering across HP's global operations. Throughout our conversation, we discuss: what motivated HP's leadership to stand up a CoE for Privacy Engineering; Aaron's approach to staffing the CoE; how a CoE's can shift privacy left in a large, matrixed organization like HP's; and, how to leverage the CoE to proactively manage privacy risk.

Aaron emphasizes the importance of understanding an organization's strategy when creating a CoE and shares his methods for...

Today, I’m joined by Amaka Ibeji, Privacy Engineer at Cruise where she designs and implements robust privacy programs and controls. In this episode, we discuss Amaka's passion for creating a culture of privacy and compliance within organizations and engineering teams. Amaka also hosts the PALS Parlor Podcast, where she speaks to business leaders and peers about privacy, AI governance, leadership, and security and explains technical concepts in a digestible way. The podcast aims to enable business leaders to do more with their data and provides a way for the community to share knowledge with one other.

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In this week's episode, I am joined by Heidi Saas, a privacy lawyer with a reputation for advocating for products and services built with privacy by design and against the abuse of personal data. In our conversation, she dives into recent FTC enforcement actions, analyzing five FTC actions and some enforcement sweeps by Colorado & Connecticut.

Heidi shares her insights on the effect of the FTC enforcement actions and what privacy engineers need to know, emphasizing the need for data management practices to be transparent, accountable, and based on affirmative consent. We cover the role of privacy engineers...

This week's episode, I chat with Chris Zeunstrom, the Founder and CEO of Ruca and Yorba. Ruca is a global design cooperative and founder support network, while Yorba is a reverse CRM that aims to reduce your digital footprint and keep your personal information safe. Through his businesses, Chris focuses on solving common problems and creating innovative products. In our conversation, we talk about building a privacy-first company, the digital minimalist movement, and the future of decentralized identity and storage.

Chris shares his journey as a privacy-focused entrepreneur and his mission to prioritize privacy and decentralization in...

In this week's episode, I sat down with Jake Ottenwaelder,  Principal Privacy Engineer at Integrative Privacy LLC. Throughout our conversation, we discuss Jake’s holistic approach to privacy implementation that considers business, engineering, and personal objectives, as well as the role of anonymization, consent management, and DSAR processes for greater privacy. 

Jake believes privacy implementation must account for the interconnectedness of privacy technologies and human interactions. He highlights what a successful implementation looks like and the negative consequences when done poorly. We also dive into the challenges of implementing privacy in fast-paced, engineering-driven organizations. We talk about the...