Google’s first privacy director, Alma Whitten, is to step down after three years in the role.
The position was created following a series of privacy breaches made by the firm, including the company’s Street View cars collecting personal data and Google Buzz making people’s private contacts public without permission.
These mistakes lead to multi-million dollar fines, prompting Google to appoint Whitten to help ensure its software engineers took account of privacy as they developed new services and updated older ones.
The search giant said Whitten had “done so much to improve our products and protect our users”.
In A statement, Google said: “The privacy and security teams, and everyone else at Google, will continue this hard work to ensure that our users’ data is kept safe and secure.”
Whitten, based in London, is being replaced in June by California-based Google software engineer Lawrence You.
Lawrence You, who has been at Google for eight years, was one of the first recruits to the privacy team Ms Whitten assembled.
