Facebook has hired an ACLU lawyer into its nascent privacy office. Timothy D. Sparapani, most recently a senior attorney at the ACLU, has been hired into the new post of director of public policy under chief privacy officer Chris Kelly (whose days are probably numbered, as many expect he will run for California AG next year).
According to the Bits Blog,
At the A.C.L.U., Mr. Sparapani worked on issues including national ID cards, data mining, open government and E-Verify, the Internet system employers use to check an employee’s immigration status.
Perhaps most importantly for Facebook, Mr. Sparapani has deep ties to some of its loudest critics at organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Digital Democracy, which have been raising alarms about Facebook’s increasingly precise ad-targeting technology and its controversially revised terms of service agreement.
Personally, I’m hoping his first order of business is implementing a system to enable people to limit their significant others’ time spent on Facebook. My wife has seemingly caught up with every person she went to summer camp with since the second grade.
Sparapani’s background (including BigLaw) after the jump.
According to the press release announcing his hiring at the ACLU in 2001,
Prior to joining the ACLU, Sparapani was for four years an associate at the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP. While there, Sparapani assisted clients on an array of lobbying issues, including increasing federal funding for childhood lead poisoning prevention. He also served as a legal intern for the Senate Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee, where he assisted Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI). Prior to attending law school, he was a legislative assistant at Hale and Dorr, LLP, and at American International Group.
Sparapani graduated from Michigan Law in 2000 and did his undergraduate at Georgetown, class of ’96.
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