Hi everyone. I am currently looking for a career change. I do have a CS PhD degree and do software engineering in the US, but I am not (yet) familiar with cryptography. With most tech companies behaving increasingly cyberpunk these days, I would love to instead do work that advance people’s privacy, in a meaningful way. I trust that this community has good opinions on what work is actually valuable and what is theater.
However, I find it quite hard to find anything about career paths towards that. Perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing, or I don’t know what I am looking for? From what I gather,
People seem to treat it as a niche in the security field. But surely privacy is more than encryption?
(Paid) opportunities in the US seem scarce. People seem to mostly do volunteer work while having another job. Or are based in Europe.
It is hard to know what skills to acquire to get into this field, beyond learning cryptography. Building tools could need anything.
I wonder if you think these feelings are true.
On the other hand, if you just google “privacy careers”, you would find privacy compliance officer positions for general companies. I wonder if these positions can be part of a path to realistically improving people’s privacy.
If anyone can point me towards anything that could provide answers, that would be very helpful. Appreciate your thoughts!
I was a software engineer for about 30 years, and towards the end of my career, I tried to get into “Privacy” at my large tech company. In my experience, “privacy” is a policy/compliance thing for most companies. It seems to be more about being a liaison between the legal dept and engineering. If you’re lucky, you can design technical frameworks (probably internal) that support privacy goals - like data governance or perhaps writing design specs/goals.
So if you’re a tech person who wants to work in “privacy”, you either need to work for a tech company that’s explicitly about enhancing privacy (like Proton or Tor), or you work on “security” in ways that enables privacy for your users - like implementing E2EE, refactoring existing code to support anonymity/de-identification, etc. Given that you have a PhD, you might look at finding ways to use homomorphic encryption or other privacy-enhancing technologies.
Not respecting user choices, pushing their goals like GenAI on users, anti-competitive behavior, chasing their own tails in the name of “it is the future”, do anything just so the stock price goes up, you name it.