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Google Privacy Director Alma Whitten Leaving
Gunkerty Jeb writes "Alma Whitten, the director of privacy at Google, is stepping down from that role and leaves behind her a complicated legacy in regards to user privacy. ... Whitten has been at Google for about 10 years, and while she has been the main public face of the company's product privacy efforts in the last couple of years, she has been involved in engineering privacy initiatives for even longer. Before becoming the privacy lead for products and engineering in 2010 in the aftermath of the Google Street View WiFi controversy, Whitten had been in charge of privacy for the company's engineering teams. During that time, she was involved in the company's public effort to fight the idea that IP addresses can be considered personally identifiable information."
The last two companies I worked at had officers sending stern warnings about how important corporate privacy was in one gmail while in another gmail saying how they expected employees to all be on google docs for sharing corporate spreadsheets and product planning, etc.
It must be nice being google. It's like having thousands of US corporations all volunteering to install your listening devices throughout their offices.
Obviously, yes.
During that time, she was involved in the company's public effort to fight the idea that IP addresses can be considered personally identifiable information.
This is retarded (to put it nicely). Is your home address "personally identifiable information"? Of course it is: even if it doesn't UNIQUELY identify you, it does narrow it down by a lot. Same as with an IP address: although it doesn't UNIQUELY identify a person, it's still "personally identifiable information".
So, basically, they are trying to fight an idea that's obvious and self-evident. Way to go, Google! Just waiting for you to start trying to convince us that "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength" and (obviously) "Privacy is Unnecessary".