I’ve long been passionate about issues of user privacy, so I jumped at the recent opportunity to spin up a new “Trust Experience” team in Google Search. Our team is responsible for aspects of the search user interfaces that affect user trust. (BTW, I’m hiring.)

I am excited about finally contributing to addressing what I think is the most difficult problem of privacy: how to give an average user transparency and meaningful control of their data, given the systems that manipulate the data are huge, complex, and opaque to almost everone.

I have a hypothesis that the key to solving this problem is to create a new kind of visualizable model that is a projection of how a user’s data is being used.

Of course, our team has some mundane work to do too, including making sure the cookie consent dialogs meet all the regulatory mandates in different jurisdictions, and are not too annoying.