About
Amanda Conway Brehm
Founder & Principal
In her 12+ years as one of Google’s top privacy experts, Amanda set the vision & machinery for much of Google's privacy protection efforts & is a global leader on privacy-first technology design. She founded Conscious Privacy Consulting — focused on human rights & women’s health with reproductive & maternal health at the fore — to facilitate meaningful change in the cause-related sector she is so passionate about.
Career Highlights & Expertise
Privacy Engineering
As a delegate to Google’s Data Protection Officer & leading expert in Biometric Privacy, Amanda partnered with product teams throughout Google to mitigate privacy risk & provide a path forward for Google’s most innovative, highest sensitivity efforts.
Product Management
Amanda invented & product managed industry-leading, user-facing blurring tools on YouTube. Available to all users to prevent surveillance & promote privacy, Amanda developed this technology for the human rights community in particular. She presented at industrywide events like RightsCon, authored YouTube official blog posts, engaged internally with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki & other executives - & externally with global news outlets including The New York Times. Her products garnered over $124M in positive PR revenue, protected vulnerable users, & drove the industry forward. She holds a patent in ML-based motion tracking and obfuscation technology.
Policy Development
With a degree in Public Policy from Duke, Amanda tackled the hardest policy and privacy challenges at YouTube & Google. She developed YouTube’s industry-leading privacy removals policy, effectively balancing privacy & free expression, & anticipating future regulation. Google-wide, Amanda led Internal Privacy Policies governing the collection & use of sensitive data (e.g., biometric, health, location).
Program Management
Amanda thoughtfully designed & executed company-wide programs to ensure the right decisions were reached with efficiency & consistency & to comply with unwieldy regulation. She bridged the gap between legal & engineering to design solutions that met requirements without stifling innovation or adding friction.
Amanda built YouTube’s privacy program from the ground up, partnering with product & engineering teams to incorporate best practices into early development & establishing the blueprint for Google - & the industry at large.
Responsible for Google’s compliance to GDPR Article 35, Amanda developed a comprehensive review program to mitigate risk & avert fines of up to 4% annual revenue.
Amanda envisioned & established Google’s first successful company-wide privacy escalation forum to address unintended user harm & unblock unprecedented innovation.
Additional Expertise
An established thought leader & privacy expert, Amanda approaches problems through a holistic, multi-disciplinary lens. She works to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing — whether via policies, programs or products — tackling complicated challenges with the simplest, most effective solutions. Aware of the stakeholder landscape, client goals & constraints, Amanda identifies the best possible path forward for all involved, building trust & cross-functional support along the way. Amanda is a compassionate leader & collaborator focused on addressing the greatest challenges facing human rights & women’s health organizations and the communities they serve.
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New York Times
YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos
“Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not, wrote Amanda Conway.”
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Buzzfeed
“During the Arab Spring, we saw activists that were jeopardizing their safety on social media to share things. No one was offering a solution to keep them safe, and so we moved quickly to try and make a change,” said Amanda Conway. “By creating face blurring tools, and quickly pushing them out, we were trying to introduce something to respond to their new safety concerns on the ground.”
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The Guardian
"As citizens continue to play a critical role in supplying news and human rights footage from around the world, YouTube is committed to creating even better tools to help them," said Amanda Conway.