Transforming SF: THE FUTURE OF PRIVACY/SECURITY--For Your Eyes Only: Keeping your Online Information Private and Secure
Moderated by Mechanics' Institute Trustee Lindsey Tonsager

How can we have maximum online access as consumers and users and still be protected from surveillance, data abuse and identity fraud? What are best practices? How can we use our social platforms and data to enhance our lives? What policies or regulations should be in place to protect us?

Panel includes Nate Cardozo, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Whitney Merrill, Attorney, Federal Trade Commission; Jacob Rogers, Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation; and Jeanne M. Sheahan, Senior Corporate Counsel - Privacy and Regulatory, Groupon. Moderator Lindsey Tonsager, Partner, Covington & Burling LLP, specializes in data privacy and cybersecurity.

Nate Cardozo is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's digital civil liberties team. In addition to his focus on free speech and privacy litigation, Nate works on EFF's cryptography policy and the Coders' Rights Project. Nate has projects involving export controls on software, state-sponsored malware, automotive privacy, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, electronic privacy law reform, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state. A 2009-2010 EFF Open Government Legal Fellow, Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from U.C. Santa Cruz and a J.D. from U.C. Hastings.

Jacob Rogers joined Wikimedia as a lawyer in November 2014, after spending a year working for the United States Senate doing government investigations, where he dealt with matters ranging from structured finance to Swiss data privacy to the ins and outs of high frequency algorithmic trading. He attended Harvard Law School where I studied several courses in intellectual property and taught copyright law through the edX program, and did his undergraduate study at UC Berkeley, where I majored in History of Science with a minor in Japanese.

Whitney Merrill is an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission. She recently received her master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she explored issues associated with the intersection of technology, information security, privacy, and the law. During her time at Illinois, she was an Illinois Cyber Security Scholar and member of the Illinois Security Lab. Her research was recently published in NDSS. And in 2014, Whitney argued and won a criminal case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, resulting in a circuit split. During law school, she served as Managing Editor of the University of Illinois Law Review and President of the Internet & Technology Law Association, and worked as a legal intern for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In her spare time, she runs the Crypto & Privacy Village (which appears at DEF CON each year) and designs puzzles.  You can find her on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or at conference near you.

Jeanne Sheahan is responsible for the development and implementation of Groupon's worldwide privacy program. She counsels Groupon's entire portfolio of brands on international data protection regulations, privacy by design, digital marketing, and consumer protection issues. Jeanne regularly partners with the product, marketing, human resources, and information security teams to promote privacy and cybersecurity best practices throughout the organization.

Prior to working at Groupon, Jeanne worked for four years at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine counseling businesses on best practices in information privacy and data security, responses to government investigations, and data breach response. Jeanne is also a seasoned litigator. While at Davis Wright Tremaine and for four years prior to that at Bingham McCutchen, she represented numerous domestic and international clients from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in bet-the-company litigation and government investigations. Jeanne is a Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) with the International Association of Privacy Professionals and is also a frequent speaker on privacy and cybersecurity issues.

Lindsey Tonsager works for Covington and Burling LLP. There, she helps national and multinational clients in a broad range of industries anticipate and effectively evaluate legal and reputational risks under federal and state data privacy and communications laws.  In addition to assisting clients engage strategically with the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. Congress, and other federal and state regulators on a proactive basis, she has experience helping clients respond to informal investigations and enforcement actions, including by self-regulatory bodies such as the Digital Advertising Alliance and Children’s Advertising Review Unit.