Bringing a passion for privacy to Cloud

Editor’s note: This is the first in our Black History Month series of Cloud Googler profiles.

Michee Smith is a product manager within Google Cloud who’s responsible for building products that help protect customer privacy when they store their data within Google Cloud. In her almost five years at Google, she’s led the charge on many key projects, like launching our first Political Ads Transparency Report, redesigning the Transparency Report to be even easier to use, and working on our efforts across Google to comply with the GDPR.

We sat down with Michee to talk about her career path, her tech passions, why representation matters, and why staying true to yourself is a winning formula.

Michee on why privacy matters

I’m passionate about making our customers super comfortable with holding data inside of Google Cloud. In my opinion, doing privacy right is twofold: Developer tools should make privacy the easiest thing to build into the product. Developers shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to deliver notice and consent flows, and enforce identity and access management policies. It should be natural to the tooling they use and how they work. The second part, and most important, is that customer expectations should be set, then met, around who accesses their data and how it’s used. Users should never be surprised about who saw their data and how it was used; products with transparency and control built-in by default helps make sure they aren’t.

At Google, I work on products like Access Transparency and Cloud Audit Logs, which help users easily track who has accessed their data and when. My affection toward privacy and security started at my previous job, when I started to learn how nuanced and technical these important topics are. I became a privacy champion for my products, doing office hours and privacy assessments to help teams understand why it’s important and how to make it easier for users to adopt these products.

Then, Google hired me to work on privacy full time, where I’ve worked on a bunch of interesting projects, including Google’s efforts to comply with the GDPR, Europe’s broad privacy regulations. Now, as a part of Google Cloud, I lead a team that builds products to make sure we are a trusted cloud for customers to put their data. At Cloud, I have the opportunity to help not just Google, but many companies across the world, work to ensure the privacy of their data.

One project on my team, called Key Access Justifications, lets customers truly be the final arbiters of access to their own data, and gives transparency around Google personnel access to their data. I also get to work on Google’s compliance efforts, and work with product managers and engineers on the best ways we can give our customers data controls.