Celebrating Privacy at Google

We always try to put our users first when we create products at Google - and that means we’re thinking about privacy all day, every day, in everything we do. With so much happening in this important area, it’s nice to take a step back and look at the big picture every once in a while.

We just did that from 10th-14th October with our first-ever Google Privacy Week. This was a company-wide series of events designed to ensure we continue to adhere to strong privacy standards and practices, and share the lessons we’ve learned and progress we’ve made over the past year. Google Privacy Week featured more than two dozen talks and training opportunities, with Googlers from around the world participating live or via videoconference.

Alma Whitten speaks to Google engineers around the world.

Key topics included:

• the design philosophy behind some of the privacy tools we’ve built, such as Circles in Google+, Ads Preferences Manager and Me On the Web
• the strengthened internal controls and review process we’ve developed over the past year that ensure we design products with privacy in mind
• how our Privacy Principles guide our approach to protecting users and giving them transparency and choice
• insights from our User Experience and Enterprise teams on what our users and customers are asking for in terms of privacy

We also welcomed some special guests, including Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP); Chris Hoofnagle of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology; and Bob Warner and Fiona Lennox of the Ofcom Consumer Communications Panel.

Author Jeff Jarvis gave a thoughtful and provocative talk about his new book Public Parts:



Google Privacy Week was a great opportunity to evaluate our progress and prepare for the work we have in front of us. It’s inspiring to see the amount of attention Googlers around the world are putting into building products, tools and options that help our users better control their privacy - both on Google products and as they browse the web.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering