Apple’s Jane Horvath Is Here to Protect Your Online Privacy

Courtesy Apple / Design Leah Romero

In ELLE.com’s monthly series Office Hours, we ask people in powerful positions to take us through their first jobs, worst jobs, and everything in between. This month, we spoke with Apple’s chief privacy officer Jane Horvath, the self-proclaimed “Forrest Gump of Privacy,” who started her career at AOL as one of the youngest lawyers on the team before joining the Department of Justice, Google, then eventually, Apple. As the head of the company’s Privacy, Policy, and Regulatory team, Horvath is responsible for all things legal, counseling on products and advocating for strong privacy rights in high-profile cases like the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, where the FBI recovered a suspect’s locked iPhone. “I feel very lucky,” she says. “I’ve been at these important moments in privacy; each day I wake up and never know what I’m going to face. But I always feel like I’ve got the best of both worlds: I get to do civil liberties and work somewhere that really looks at privacy as a fundamental human right.” In fact, data protection is even the subject of a just-released Apple ad. Below, the privacy expert talks best practices, career advice, and why protecting your online persona is more important than ever.

My first job

During my freshman through senior year of high school, I worked at Baskin-Robbins. While Apple is my top job, that was one of my most fun jobs. I worked there with all of my best friends back home in Alexandria, Virginia—one was my manager, and would fire me periodically because I didn’t wear the ugly brown hat. When you’re in high school, you don’t want to wear an ugly brown hat. That experience taught me some really valuable lessons about working hourly, and how many hours go into paying for one nice sweater. I also learned that the customer is always right: even if you think you’ve got their scoop of ice cream right, sometimes you don’t.

Design Leah Romero

My worst job

Working for a government contractor as a programmer. Even though I had a computer science degree, every time we got into the conference room, I was always mistaken for being the secretary. That got old, but I think it really gave me the drive to go out and take the LSAT. (My roommate at the time—who’s still one of my closest friends—was taking it, and did not want to do it by herself.) I don’t know what I was thinking, like, who would want to do that on a Saturday? But I took it, and [my score] came out really well, so I went to law school instead. I thank her to this day; she really was responsible for my career.

How I felt joining Apple

The irony is that when I graduated from William & Mary, my dream job at that point was working for Apple. I did not get a job with Apple, so it was just a very delayed sense of gratification. I like to say that I’m the Forrest Gump of privacy. When I was working at AOL as a startup, I got to draft what may be the first privacy policy ever, because I was the most junior lawyer on the team and we had gotten served with a search warrant from the FBI for a bunch of content. Then I went on to DOJ, and that was post-9/11—a very fraught time for civil liberties—and took a congressionally mandated job to protect privacy. From there, I went to Google, where I got very good introduction to the internet world and all the issues there.

Apple’s business model is so different. From my very first meeting, when we were debating what data the engineers can collect off a device, a colleague said to me, “We might be able to string this data together to all of the other data we’re collecting and somehow identify someone, and we don’t want to do that.” I thought, Wow, I have arrived at a place that really, really protects privacy. During the San Bernardino case, we were asked to open a phone that was found in [the suspect’s] car, and it was a really hard discussion. We would have opened that phone if we could have opened it and not impacted every other phone, but we couldn’t, and so we decided that we wanted to protect all of our customers and resist the government’s ask to build an operating system that would’ve basically made every other phone vulnerable.

Ways to protect your privacy online

If there is a choice that comes up, read carefully—and pay attention. Every website has a lot of choices that make it more complicated, but if you’re on the iOS platform, we’ve really tried to make those choices simple and actionable, whether you’re reviewing privacy nutrition labels, looking at your app privacy report, or checking your privacy settings. And think. Take a pause when one of those boxes come up, and read a little bit about what it’s saying. Also, go back and look at the choices you’ve made, because even I, in the heat of just wanting something, make certain choices. That, and always think before you post. Data gets out there, and it’s very hard to bring it back.

The best career advice I’ve received

Someone smart once told me when I was young that when a road comes, sometimes you should take that road. Looking back, if I had set myself in stone on one career path, I would never be sitting here, because privacy wasn’t even a specialty for my first seven years of practicing law—there was no such thing as a privacy lawyer. With every career turn I’ve made, I’ve always thought, Well, you know what, I can do this, if it doesn’t work out, there are other opportunities to go back. Sometimes taking that step is hard, but try not to always focus on the future, and take those opportunities when they come your way, because you might find yourself in an entirely new specialty like I did.

Design Leah Romero

Why privacy is more important than ever

A lot of people will say, “Privacy doesn’t matter to me at all; I don’t care, everybody can take my data,” but then you pick up the newspaper, and if you live on the East Coast, there was a period where you couldn’t fill up your car because the pipeline was taken hostage by ransomware. That is about data and that is about security, and ultimately, if you don’t have security, you don’t have privacy. So every day you hear or read about different incursions…advertising is big right now, and I think people would be quite surprised by the amount of data that exists out there in the B2B world about them. That’s something that we’re very much trying to bring to the attention of our customers, not because we want them to make a choice one way or the other, but because we actually want them to be aware of it.

My approach to managing my online identity

As a parent, and because I’ve been in privacy for so long through different movements, I would say I’m not very active online. I tend to be someone that holds my personal autonomy pretty close. My daughter is 18 years old, and we’ve had a very long dialogue about a lot of the issues that children are currently facing on the internet. I think it would shock a lot of people to know how common sexting is amongst the teenage group—we’ve had conversations about that. She once told me a story about a girl who shared a nude photo with her then-boyfriend that went viral all over the internet. When you start to think about privacy as controlling what the world thinks of you, your personal autonomy, every time you hit “post” or “share,” you don’t pull it back—you’re giving a little bit of yourself to the world.

Now, kids have these entire social personas that they have to build up. I had moments in my life where I could reinvent myself, from high school to college, college to law school, you could leave it all behind. Now, you’ve got such an amount of data waste out there, and then the peer pressure to constantly post and constantly look like you’re having this amazing time.

How I’ve navigated changing privacy laws

I’ve been at Apple for 10 years, and the regulatory framework has only gotten stricter. Europe is essentially leading the way on privacy laws—we’ve had to put in place a much more rigorous compliance function, and as more laws pass, you have to make sure that the company complies with those laws. For General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is the European version, we’ve essentially committed to giving our customers the same user rights as the Europeans, regardless of where they sit. We have built a worldwide compliance function to make sure all of our customers are in the privileged position to have the same user rights as Europe.

A lesson I learned the hard way

Autofill. Sometimes you need to really look before you text. Make sure the address you’re sending it to when it autofills is really that address. The other one is privacy hygiene. Every month or so, I’ll go back through and I’ll be like, “What? Why would I have given this app access to location in the background?” The beauty of how we’ve designed things is you can go back and look at the choices you’ve made and exert control again.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Claire Stern Deputy Editor Claire Stern is the Deputy Editor of ELLE.com.

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