About me
Debra J. Farber is a seasoned privacy executive and leader with over 20 years of experience operationalizing privacy across complex, data-driven environments. She spent the bulk of her career operationalizing privacy programs at companies large and small before shifting left into privacy engineering. She currently serves as Privacy Engineering Manager at Lumin Digital, where her team embeds privacy early into a cloud-native digital banking platform. Debra has led privacy and security programs at Amazon Prime Video, AWS, BigID, Visa, TrustArc, and IBM, and serves as Advisory Board member to several privacy tech startups, guiding them on product strategy, go-to-market messaging, and responsible data practices. In addition, with a strong interest and focus on responsible AI, she advocates for organizations to embed privacy and ethical guardrails throughout the AI lifecycle.
Debra is an active member of the privacy engineering community. A passionate advocate for shifting privacy left in the software development lifecycle to address privacy issues early, she created and hosted The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast, which published 63 episodes spotlighting how privacy engineers can integrate privacy early and effectively into the software development lifecycle before code is shipped and PII is ever collected. She's also a Member of the USENIX PEPR Conference's Programming Committee and is an Advisor to the Institute of Operational Privacy Design (IOPD). She holds a BA from Binghamton University, a JD from Brooklyn Law School, and a Certificate in Designing and Building AI Systems from Cornell University. She also holds multiple certifications, including the CISSP, CIPP/E, CIPP/EU, CIPT, and CIPM, among others. Her work sits at the intersection of privacy, security, engineering, and trust where she aims to consistently drive scalable, privacy-respecting outcomes.
