Aleecia McDonald

Founder, Privacy Needs Company. Former Associate Director of the Privacy Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University

Bio

Aleecia M. McDonald is the founder of Privacy Needs Company, a boutique public benefit corporation. Previously, she was the Associate Director of the Privacy Engineering program, and an Assistant Professor of the practice at the Information Networking Institute, both at Carnegie Mellon. She was the Director of Privacy at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford, and a Senior Privacy Researcher at Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser.) She co-chaired the WC3’s Tracking Protection Working Group, which was an effort to establish international standards for a Do Not Track mechanism that users can enable to request enhanced privacy online. Dr. McDonald focuses on the public policy issues of Internet privacy, including user expectations for privacy tools, behavioral economics and mental models of privacy, and privacy education. 

McDonald’s decade of experience working in software startups adds a practical focus to her academic work, and she was a senior privacy researcher for Mozilla prior to working as director of Privacy at Stanford. Her findings have been featured in media outlets such as the Washington Post, Ars Technica, and NPR. She has presented findings in testimony to the California Assembly, and contributed to testimony before the United States Senate and the Federal Trade Commission.