Apple has recruited a quondam employee and vocal critic of Facebook to join its privacy team, according to the Financial Times.
Sandy Parakilas, who burned-out a year and a half monitoring privacy and policy compliance by software developers before leaving Facebook in October 2012, command reportedly become a privacy manager on Apple’s policy team.
Apple has been placing a huge emphasis on its seclusion features, especially compared with its peers including Facebook, Google and Amazon. This was on display in a big way at this year’s Consumer Electronics Pretension, where Apple plastered a large ad on the side of a hotel overlooking the site of the conference.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken a last himself on Facebook’s privacy policies. In a March interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Cook responded to a examine about what he would do if he were in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
“I wouldn’t be in this post,” he said.
Parakilas has also spoken publicly about Facebook’s privacy practices, making him an interesting fit for the security-focused Apple. He fifty-fifty appeared in front of the U.K.’s House of Commons in March to present evidence about Facebook’s practices in front of the Digital, Customs, Media and Sport Committee.
According to a transcript of the hearing, Parakilas testified, “I was one of the people raising concerns” at Facebook during his epoch there as a platform operations manager in 2011 and 2012.
“There was a lot of press at the time suggesting that this was potentially infringing people’s privacy and that there were some real concerns here,” Parakilas said, referring to the way Facebook’s purchasers’ data was gathered by developers at the time. “It was a known issue. What has changed is that people now realize how many possessions you can do with large amounts of data and so now they are connecting those two dots and we have the current scandal.”
Apple and Facebook did not in a second respond to requests for comment.
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