S3E10: 'How a Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence Shifts Privacy Left' with Aaron Weller (HP)

The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

In this episode, I sat down with Aaron Weller, the Leader of HP's Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE), focused on providing technical solutions for privacy engineering across HP's global operations. Throughout our conversation, we discuss: what motivated HP's leadership to stand up a CoE for Privacy Engineering; Aaron's approach to staffing the CoE; how a CoE's can shift privacy left in a large, matrixed organization like HP's; and, how to leverage the CoE to proactively manage privacy risk.
Aaron emphasizes the importance of understanding an organization's strategy when creating a CoE and shares his methods for gathering data to inform the center's roadmap and team building. He also highlights the great impact that a Center of Excellence can offer and gives advice for implementing one in your organization. We touch on the main challenges in privacy engineering today and the value of designing user-friendly privacy experiences. In addition, Aaron provides his perspective on selecting the right combination of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for anonymity, how to go about implementing PETs, and the role that AI governance plays in his work.

Topics Covered:

• Aaron’s deep privacy and consulting background and how he ended up leading HP's Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence
• The definition of a "Center of Excellence" (CoE) and how a Privacy Engineering CoE can drive value for an organization and shift privacy left
• What motivates a company like HP to launch a CoE for Privacy Engineering and what it's reporting line should be
• Aaron's approach to creating a Privacy Engineering CoE roadmap; his strategy for staffing this CoE; and the skills & abilities that he sought
• How HP's Privacy Engineering CoE works with the business to advise on, and select, the right PETs for each business use case
• Why it's essential to know the privacy guarantees that your organization wants to assert before selecting the right PETs to get you there
• Lessons Learned from setting up a Privacy Engineering CoE and how to get executive sponsorship
• The amount of time that Privacy teams have had to work on AI issues over the past year, and advice on preventing burnout
• Aaron's hypothesis about the value of getting an early handle on governance over the adoption of innovative technologies
• The importance of being open to continuous learning in the field of privacy engineering

Guest Info:

• Connect with Aaron on LinkedIn
• Learn about HP's Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence
• Review the OWASP Machine Learning Security Top 10
• Review the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

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Chapters

1. S3E10: 'How a Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence Shifts Privacy Left' with Aaron Weller (HP) (00:00:00)

2. Introducing Aaron Weller, Leader of the HP Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence (00:01:55)

3. The definition of a "Center of Excellence"(CoE); and how a Privacy Engineering CoE can drive value for an organization & enable it to shift privacy left (00:03:55)

4. What motivates a company like HP to launch a CoE for Privacy Engineering and what it's reporting line should be (00:06:02)

5. Aaron's approach to creating a Privacy Engineering CoE roadmap; his strategy for staffing this CoE; and the skills & abilities that he sought (00:09:06)

6. How HP's Privacy Engineering CoE works with the business to advise on and select the right PETs for each use case (00:13:09)

7. Lessons Learned from setting up a Privacy Engineering CoE; and advice on how to convince business leaders at other companies of the ROI for a CoE (00:20:35)

8. The amount of time that Privacy teams have had to work on AI issues over the past year; and Aaron's advice on preventing burnout for Privacy Engineering teams (00:25:24)

9. Aaron's hypothesis about the value of getting an early handle on governance over the adoption of innovative technologies (00:28:35)

10. Aaron's advice for those who want to get into privacy engineering (00:32:56)