The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

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 tech...

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...

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 comp...

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...

In this week's episode, I am joined by Steve Tout, Practice Lead at Integrated Solutions Group (ISG) and Host of The Nonconformist Innovation Podcast to discuss the intersection of privacy and identity. Steve has 18+ years of experience in global Identity & Access Management (IAM) and is currently completing his MBA from Santa Clara University. Throughout our conversation, Steve shares his journey as a reformed technologis...

This week, I chat with Jake Ward, the Co-Founder and CEO of Data Protocol, to discuss how the Data Protocol platform supports developers' accountability for privacy by giving developers the relevant information in the way that they want it. Throughout the episode, we cover the Privacy Engineering course offerings and certification program; how to improve communication with  developers; and trends that Jake sees across his cust...

My guest this week is Jay Averitt, Senior Privacy Product Manager and Privacy Engineer at Microsoft, where he transitioned his career from Technology Attorney to Privacy Counsel, and most recently to Privacy Engineer.

In this episode, we hear from Jay about: his professional path from a degree in Management Information Systems to Privacy Engineer; how Twitter and Microsoft navigated a privacy setup, and how to determine pr...

In Honor of Data Privacy Week 2024, we're publishing a special episode. Instead of interviewing a guest, Debra shares her 'Top 20 Privacy Engineering Resources' and why. Check out her favorite free privacy engineering courses, books, podcasts, creative learning platforms, privacy threat modeling frameworks, conferences, government resources, and more.

DEBRA's TOP 20 PRIVACY ENGINEERING RESOURCES (in no ...

My guest this week is Patricia Thaine, Co-founder and CEO of Private AI, where she leads a team of experts in developing cutting-edge solutions using AI to identify, reduce, and remove Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in 52 languages across text, audio, images, and documents.

In this episode, we hear from Patricia about: her transition from starting a Ph.D. to co-founding an AI company; how Private AI set out to s...

My guest this week is Kevin Killens, CEO of AHvos, a technology service that provides AI solutions for data-heavy businesses using a proprietary technology called Contextually Responsive Intelligence (CRI), which can act upon a business's private data and produce results without storing that data.

In this episode, we delve into this technology and learn more from Kevin about: his transition from serving in the Navy to...

My guest this week is Nabanita De, Software Engineer, Serial Entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO at Privacy License where she's on a mission to transform the AI landscape. In this episode, we discuss Nabanita's transition from Engineering Manager at Remitly to startup founder; what she's learned from her experience at Antler's accelerator program, her first product to market: PrivacyGPT and her work to educate P...

My guests this week are Yusra Ahmad, CEO of Acuity Data, and Luke Beckley, Data Protection Officer and Privacy Governance Manager at Correla, who work with The RED (Real Estate Data) Foundation, a sector-wide alliance that enables the real estate sector to benefit from an increased use of data, while voiding some of the risks that this presents, and better serving society.

We discuss the current drivers for change within t...

This week, I welcome Jared Coseglia, co-founder and CEO at TRU Staffing Partners, a contract staffing & executive placement search firm that represents talent across 3 core industry verticals: data privacy, eDiscovery, & cybersecurity. We discuss the current and future state of the contracting market for privacy engineering rols and the market drivers that affect hiring. You’ll learn about the hiring trends and the allure o...

This week’s guests are Mathew Mytka and Alja Isakovoić, Co-Founders of Tethix, a company that builds products that embed ethics into the fabric of your organization. We discuss Matt and Alja’s core mission to bring ethical tech to the world, and Tethix’s services that work with your Agile development processes. You’ll learn about Tethix’s solution to address 'The Intent to Action Gap,' and what Elemental Ethics can provid...

This week’s guest is Isabel Barberá, Co-founder, AI Advisor, and Privacy Engineer at Rhite , a consulting firm specializing in responsible and trustworthy AI and privacy engineering, and creator of The Privacy Library Of Threats 4 Artificial Intelligence Framework and card game. In our conversation, we discuss: Isabel’s work with privacy-by-design, privacy engineering, privacy threat modeling, and building trustworthy AI; and info ...

This week, I sat down with Vaibhav Antil ('Vee'), Co-founder & CEO at Privado, a privacy tech platform that's leverages privacy code scanning & data mapping to bridge the privacy engineering gap.  Vee shares his personal journey into privacy, where he started out in Product Management and saw need for privacy automation in DevOps. We discuss obstacles created by the rapid pace of engineering teams and a lack ...

This week’s guest is Rebecca Balebako,  Founder and Principal Consultant at Balebako Privacy Engineer, where she enables data-driven organizations to build the privacy features that their customers love. In our conversation, we discuss all things privacy red teaming, including: how to disambiguate adversarial privacy tests from other software development tests; the importance of privacy-by-infrastructure; why privacy maturity influ...

This week’s guest is Steve Hickman, the founder of Epistimis, a privacy-first process design tooling startup that evaluate rules and enables the fixing of privacy issues before they ever take effect. In our conversation, we discuss: why the biggest impediment to protecting and respecting privacy within organizations is the lack of a common language; why we need a common Privacy Ontology in addition to a Privacy Taxonomy; Epistimis&...

This week's guest is Shashank Tiwari, a seasoned engineer and product leader who started with algorithmic systems of Wall Street before becoming Co-founder & CEO of Uno.ai, a pathbreaking autonomous security company. He started with algorithmic systems on Wall Street and then transitioned to building Silicon Valley startups, including previous stints at Nutanix, Elementum, Medallia, & StackRox. In this conversation, we...