Speaker Bios

Chris Babel

CEO, TRUSTe

Chris Babel is the CEO of TRUSTe, the leading trustmark and recognized authority on Internet trust and privacy. Chris possesses over a decade of experience building online trust, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign's worldwide Authentication Services business, where he was responsible for strategy, sales, marketing, product and support. Chris also previously managed VeriSign's SSL and Managed Security Services business. In these roles he helped grow the businesses though the launch of new products to enterprise and small/medium businesses, international expansion in EMEA and Asia and through acquisition and integration of a number of companies. Chris also spent time in Corporate Development and as Chief of Staff to the CEO where he led strategic planning and execution of over 20 acquisitions. Prior to joining VeriSign, Chris served as an Associate in Morgan Stanley's Technology Mergers and Acquisitions group and its Corporate Finance group working on transactions like Netscape's sale to AOL. Chris holds a BA in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Economics with Highest Distinction from Northwestern University and lives with his wife and three sons in San Francisco.

Michelle Dennedy

VP and Chief Privacy Officer, McAfee

Michelle currently serves as Chief Privacy Officer to McAfee, an Intel Company. She is responsible for creating a privacy practice that is focused on quality and excellence in McAfee’s policies, products, procedures and governance efforts. Before coming to McAfee, Michelle founded The iDennedy Project, a consulting and advisory company specializing in privacy and security sensitive organizations. Michelle is also a founder and editor in chief of a new media site—TheIdentityProject.com—that was started as an advocacy and education site, currently focused on the growing crime of Child Michelle was the Vice President for Security & Privacy Solutions for the Oracle Corporation. Before the Oracle acquisition of Sun, Michelle was Chief Data Governance Officer within the Cloud Computing division at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Michelle worked closely with Sun’s business, technical and legal teams to create to the best data governance policies and processes possible for cloud computing to build trust for cloud environments through vendor transparency. Michelle also served as Sun’s Chief Privacy Officer where she was responsible for the development and implementation of Sun’s data privacy policies and practices, working across Sun’s business groups to drive the company’s continued data privacy excellence. Michelle is a Co–author, “The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value”, 2014, Apress Media.

Laura Hamady

Associate General Counsel, Privacy & eCommerce, Levi Strauss & Co.

Laura Hamady is Associate General Counsel, Privacy & eCommerce at Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco. Before joining LS&Co., Laura served as Groupon, Inc.’s Chief Privacy Officer and Associate General Counsel of its Regulatory and Government Affairs group in Chicago, has held related commercial in-house positions at Orbitz and Takeda Pharmaceuticals and advised clients on marketing and promotional law matters while at law firms.

Barbara Lawler

Chief Privacy Officer, Intuit 

Barbara Lawler is the first Chief Privacy Officer at Intuit, makers of, TurboTax®, QuickBooks®, and other online financial services, and is responsible for creating and driving data stewardship, privacy by design and data use accountability, regulatory analysis to deliver the best experiences to customers and employees. Intuit tied for first as the “Most Trusted Company for Privacy in America” in 2007, and finished in the top 10 since 2006. Before Intuit, Ms. Lawler spent over 20 years in privacy, data management and marketing at Hewlett Packard, and was their first Chief Privacy Officer.  While there, she lead a global team responsible for online and offline privacy strategy, policy and Privacy By Design standards creation to support the HP brand and standing as an exemplary corporate citizen.  HP was chosen as the inaugural “Most Trusted Company for Privacy” in 2004.  Ms. Lawler participates in privacy and information policy leadership groups, including the Executive Committee of the Center for Information Policy Leadership (CIPL), Ponemon Institute RIM Council Advisory Board (Chair), TRUSTe Advisory Board, The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), Information Accountability Foundation.  Personally invited to be a Privacy by Design Ambassador, Ontario Canada IPC Dr. Ann Cavoukian.  She is a previous member of the IAPP Board of Directors, has served on the California Office of Privacy Protection Advisory Board for breach notification, and the BBBOnLine Advisory Board.  She has testified twice before the U.S. Congress House Energy and Commerce Committee (2001, 2011), twice before the Senate Commerce Committee (2002, 2011), the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (2004-2011) and the Internal Revenue Service (2006).  She has a B.S. in Business from San Jose State University, certifications in Advertising and Marketing Communications, and is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/US).

Michelle Quinn

Business Columnist, San Jose Mercury News

Prior to her current role, she was the Silicon Valley correspondent at Politico covering tech policy and politics. She has also covered the tech industry at the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a blogger for the New York Times and wrote an article that appeared in the first issue of Wired. She lives in Oakland with her husband and two children.

Kevin Trilli

VP of Product, TRUSTe

Kevin brings over 15 years of high-tech product management and entrepreneurial experience to TRUSTe and is an industry thought leader around online identity, reputation and trust. Prior to TRUSTe, Kevin founded AssertID, a technology company that provides identity- and age-verification services for social networks. Previously, Kevin spent eight years at VeriSign, including as director of product management for the SSL, authentication and security services business units. Kevin holds multiple patents and patent applications in online identity.Before joining the Internet industry, Kevin held positions in the semiconductor and chemical industries in product management, product development, engineering and operations. Kevin has a Masters of Science in Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he is a Sloan Fellow. Kevin also holds a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he concurrently served as a lab administrator for the University Computer Services Organization.

Tom Widgery

Director of Privacy and Information Security Governance, SVB Financial Group

Tom has been in the privacy industry for over 12 years, currently leading the privacy and information security governance program at Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group (a global financial services company with locations in US, Europe, Middle East, China & Hong Kong) and is responsible for strategy and execution of privacy and information governance across the organization. Prior to joining SVBFG Tom spent 7 years at Western Union in the privacy organization as the director of privacy for the Americas, EU, Middle East and Africa regions. In the distant past Tom actually wrote code for both mainframe and online applications and has real world experience of engineering privacy on the development side, before it was cool. Tom holds a B.Sc In Environmental Science from the University of Sussex (UK) and is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/US) and Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM).