CNET and AllThingsD reported on Tuesday that President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, a legal director at Twitter, to be the White House’s first chief privacy officer.
People familiar with the situation said that the White House does not intend to create a chief privacy officer post, but is looking to add a senior adviser to its chief technology officer, Todd Park.
These people described the hiring discussions as developing and said that Ms. Wong was among the leading contenders, who also include other Silicon Valley executives.
Social media companies and e-mail providers increasingly find themselves on the front lines of high-level policy discussions concerning privacy. Twitter, Facebook and Google must regularly contend with government demands that they hand over users’ personal information.
According to a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation survey, the companies are cooperating to varying degrees. The survey — titled “Who Has Your Back?” — examined the privacy policies of 18 major Internet companies. Twitter got top marks with six out of six stars, compared with a single star each for Apple, Yahoo and AT&T. (Verizon was awarded none.)
Before joining Twitter last year, Ms. Wong spent eight years at Google where she oversaw policy, privacy and copyright-related issues. She was the subject of a lengthy 2008 New York Times Magazine article, which said she and her team “have arguably more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.”