PrivacyCode, Inc. is an early stage venture that applies requirements based and user centric design principles to plan, measure and map privacy engineering productions. Michelle Finneran Dennedy serves as PrivacyCode’s CEO.
Privatus Consulting is the home of Wicked Privacy™ and assists clients with metrics, methodologies and mentorship to build and accelerate data protection practices. Michelle serves as Partner.
She is the co-author of The Privacy Engineer’s Manifesto & the Privacy Engineer’s Companion. Michelle instantiated and was the founding Chair for the recently approved and published IEEE 7002 (2022) Standard for ethics and governance of privacy engineered systems.
Before working at PrivacyCode and Privatus, Michelle was a VP and Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco. She developed and implemented the organization's data privacy policies and practices, working across business groups to drive data privacy excellence across the security continuum.
Michelle has also served as CEO of DrumWave, Inc., Chief Privacy Officer for McAfee/ Intel and 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 also served as Sun’s first Chief Privacy Officer.
Michelle is known for evangelizing new approaches and business justifications for soundly-defined, transparent security and privacy policies and systems that protect healthy, safe, and ethical global businesses. Michelle has a JD from Fordham University School of Law and a Bachelor of Science degree with university honors from The Ohio State University.
Among other awards, in 2009, she was awarded the Goodwin Procter-IAPP Vanguard award for lifetime achievement and the EWF–CSO Magazine Woman of Influence award. In 2012, she was recognized by the National Diversity Council as one of California’s Most Powerful & Influential Women. In 2014 she was cited as an AlwaysOn Power Player in On-Demand Computing and was honored as the Gold Stevie award as Woman of the Year in Technology.
