What is the Privacy Council?

The Privacy Council is an evolution of Mozilla's Privacy Friends. The name is likely to change again, based on feedback that a Council is too formal, whereas Friends was too informal. The latest thinking is to call this group the Privacy Peers - or Privacy Technical Peers. Whatever we call it, essentially, it's a group of Mozillians with technical backgrounds who have an interest in privacy that they'd like to develop into an expertise in privacy. Right now, that's through "on the job" training (i.e. working directly with Mozilla's Privacy team), but we'd like to offer some additional privacy training, so if you have ideas or concerns, please feel free to share them with stacy at mozilla dot com.

What the Council Does / Roles

Currently, Technical Privacy Peers assist with privacy reviews. The question on the table is how best to do that? Ideally, we'd like peers to get involved in the early design phase, help document data elements and flows, and evaluate alternative approaches.

Option 1): Partner with Curtis to add additional scale for Technical Privacy Reviews.

Option 2): Create a Technical Privacy Module, with the privacy team as owners, and privacy volunteers from engineering as peers.

How Decisions Are Made

Technical privacy peers ask questions, raise concerns, and make suggestions, but go/no go decisions are ultimately made/recommended by the privacy team. Rather than close bugs independently, peers work with privacy team owners to close bugs.

Privacy Council meetings are currently adhoc. To find out about them ask on irc #privacy.

Next Meeting

April 15, 1pm PST

Previous Meetings

• Mar 12, 2014 1PM
• Topic: Bug Triage continuation

Meeting Notes