What just happened? Google, a company that has spent years being criticized for its privacy failings, is losing its chief privacy officer. Keith Enright is leaving the Alphabet-owned firm after 13 years, and Google has no plans to replace him or its head of competition law, who is also on the way out.
Enright was well-liked and respected, reports Forbes, having taken the position of chief privacy officer in September 2018, a time when Google was facing a Senate Commerce Committee over concerns about data privacy. Enright testified before the committee alongside privacy chiefs from Amazon and Apple.
"After over 13 years at Google, I'm ready for a change, and will be moving on this fall, taking all that I've learned and trying something new," Enright wrote in a post on LinkedIn. He will remain at Google until September.
Enright represented the company in front of Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and several data commissions around the world, Forbes added.
Also leaving Google this year is the company's head of competition law, Matthew Bye, after 15 years at the firm. It comes as the Department of Justice's landmark antitrust trial over Google's search engine monopoly concluded. The case revolves around Google paying $26.3 billion to companies in 2021 to be the default search engine on various mobile phones and web browsers.
Google spokesperson Jenn Crider confirmed that Enright and Bye will leave their posts later this year and will not be replaced.
Confirmation that Google's chief privacy officer is leaving comes days after a leaked internal database from the company revealed thousands of privacy and security failings that Google flagged between 2013 and 2018 – before Enright took the position. They include email addresses being exposed, license plate numbers being collected, and a government cloud customer's data being transferred to a consumer product. There was also the case of a Google contractor accessing private videos in Nintendo's YouTube account and leaking information ahead of the gaming giant's planned announcements.
In April, Google agreed to delete browsing data that it collected from Chrome users who were in Incognito mode. The move was part of a settlement in a lawsuit that claims the company tracked people who assumed they were browsing the web privately by going Incognito.
Google's privacy chief and head of competition law are leaving, will not be replaced
