What do you do? A brief description of what you do and your role.

I’m the Privacy Engineering Lead at Canva. I drive the roadmap and strategy for tackling different compliance issues, including data retention, consent management, licensing rules, data portability, cookies, deidentification, and audit. I coordinate two teams that design and build solutions to make compliance easier for our engineers across the company and ensure our customers’ needs and rights are consistently respected.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone trying to make an impact in data or AI governance right now?

There is a key moment between obtaining domain knowledge and designing solutions where really knowing the stakeholders’ day-to-day experience can make a huge difference. Before deciding how you’ll achieve compliance, find someone who is willing to let you shadow them, or to walk you through their existing process that you’re looking to change. Engage with them. It is the best way to avoid making their life harder than necessary, and sometimes leads to implementation gems that you’d never think of yourself, which makes everything else like playing on easy mode.

Looking ahead, what’s next for you, and where do you see data/AI governance heading?

I see our customers and communities developing more diverse views and appetites as the gap between new technology adopters and traditionalists widens. For a governance program driven by consumer needs and trust, like mine, this diversity makes our job much harder. I’m putting a lot of effort into user research to ensure our personas remain representative. I can also see a growing need to provide our users with greater agency and customisation to help them craft a product experience that suits them. Translating this into workable policy for staff and systems without stifling growth is the next big challenge for me.