Facebook hires top EEF lawyer and Facebook critic as Whatsapp privacy policy manager

Nate Cardozo, former top legal counsel at  Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been hired to undertake a privacy role at Whatsapp. Cardoza, who until recently worked as a Senior Information Security Counsel with the EFF, is also known as a prominent Facebook critic. He has already worked with private companies on privacy policies that protect user rights; and now, hopping aboard along with the Facebook team he says that “the privacy team I’ll be joining knows me well, and knows exactly how I feel about tech policy, privacy, and encrypted messaging. And that’s who they want at managing privacy at WhatsApp. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity.”

In a 2015, Cardozo wrote a blog post, questioning Facebook’s ethical morals. He alleged Facebook’s data models  “depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy” to execute its operations of tracking users through their behaviour on the social media site.

This can also been seen as a strategic move by Facebook, who hired Cardozo immediately after the attention Facebook drew to its intention of integrating  WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Security and privacy-minded personnel expressed their concerns about what else the integration could possibly mean to user security. The EEF has also been critical of Facebook, related to Whatsapp’s user privacy and criticism over secretly released Facebook documents that outlined illicit practices being performed at the company.

While hiring such a top EEF personnel may put several privacy minded people at rest, users on HackerNews are speculating if the move was calculative by ‘removing a critic and making him an ally and have removed him from constantly stirring controversy.’

Alongside Nate, Facebook has also hired Robyn Greene from the Open Technology Institute to focus on law enforcement access and data protection at Facebook. She announced the news on Twitter yesterday.

Some personal news: After 4.5 amazing years at @OTI working on privacy and security issues, I’m moving on.

I’m thrilled to share that next week I’ll join @facebook‘s incredible team as a privacy policy manager on law enforcement access and data protection issues! 1/3

— Robyn Greene (@Robyn_Greene) January 29, 2019

You can head over to CNBC for more insights on this news.

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