By Julia Angwin
- Getty Images
- The Kindle Fire
Amazon.com Inc. has hired Nuala O’Connor in a newly created position overseeing privacy — making Amazon one of the last of the Internet giants to appoint a top privacy counsel.
In the past year, Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. have both hired chief privacy officers. Google Inc. has had a global privacy counsel for more than five years.
Ms. O’Connor will take on a new role as vice president and associate general counsel, compliance and privacy. She has been chief privacy leader at General Electric Co. since 2005. Prior to that, she served as chief privacy officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Amazon had a privacy dust-up last year when it launched the Kindle Fire tablet with a Web browser called Silk that routed Web surfers through Amazon’s servers. In October, Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) expressed concern that the browser would “enable Amazon to collect and utilize an extraordinary amount of information about its users’ Internet surfing and buying habits.”
Amazon responded that its browser would only collect “aggregate browsing activity” and would “not link browsing activity to individual customers’ browsing habits.”