On Operationalizing Privacy Engineering into the Product Development Process (featuring Michelle Finneran-Dennedy)

Last week in my Privacy & Technology course at Santa Clara Law’s leading privacy program, we tackled privacy engineering. As some of you may know, I am teaching my experiential Privacy & Technology course this semester. I previously wrote about it here and here.

Given last week’s privacy engineering focus, who better to have as a guest lecturer than Michelle Finneran-Dennedy (Mdennedy), whose book, The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto, is one of the texts we’re reading for class (along with Prof. Woodrow Hartzog’s Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies). For folks who don’t know Michelle, she’s half-lawyer and half-engineer by training, which make her the perfect person to teach the students how to bridge the divide between law/policy and technology/engineering in privacy. She’s also a veteran Chief Privacy Officer, having led privacy at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, McAfee/Intel Security, and Cisco. Now she’s come out of stealth as CEO and cofounder of privacy tech startup, Zen Data Privacy.

This post is dedicated to sharing the following valuable takeaways from her guest lecture on operationalizing privacy engineering into product development:

• Privacy engineering provides a discipline for building privacy principles into different outputs. We started off with the foundational definition of privacy engineering. Privacy engineering is “a…