Heather West | Senior Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Services
Venable LLP

Heather West is a policy and tech translator, product consultant, and long-term digital strategist guiding the intersection of emerging technologies, culture, governments, and policy. Equipped with degrees in both computer and cognitive science, Heather focuses on data governance, data security, artificial intelligence (AI), and privacy in the digital age. She is a subject matter authority who has written extensively about AI and other data driven topics for over a decade. She is also a member of the Washington Post's The Network, "a group of high-level digital security experts" selected to weigh in on pressing cybersecurity issues. An information privacy professional, Heather has led standards and policy efforts around emerging technologies throughout her career. She regularly collaborates with stakeholders and policymakers in Washington, DC, and with global product and policy teams, to help steer the conversation on the role of AI in society and its impact on privacy and security. Heather previously served as the director of the privacy policy team at one of the world's largest social technology companies, leading policy development around the company's work to develop privacy-protective product experiences, building policy frameworks that create accountability, and promoting privacy-protective decision making across the company. Earlier in her career, Heather helped found the public policy team at a website performance and security company and served as the global and federal privacy and security issue expert on a multinational technology company's public policy team. She started her career working on government technology, privacy, and identity management at a public interest group focused on the rights of individual users in relation to technical policy.