Debra Farber

Debra J. Farber is the Sr. Director of Privacy Strategy at BigID, where she leads initiatives related to privacy evangelism, industry collaboration, product innovation, and channel partnerships. She has over 14 years of experience with privacy and security strategy, operations, product development, public policy, and compliance efforts across industries and frameworks. A leader in her field, Debra co-founded Women in Security and Privacy (WISP), a non-profit project based in San Francisco, and currently serves on several advisory boards. She is a member of the IEEE Data Privacy Process Standards Working Group and IAPP CIPT Exam Development Advisory Board. In addition, she serves on the Editorial Board for Cyber Security: A Peer-Reviewed Journal and as an IAPP Denver KnowledgeNet Co-Chair.

Until recently, Debra served as Executive Consultant & Chief Privacy Officer at Cranium USA, a privacy and security consulting firm with a strong focus on GDPR implementation. Prior to launching Cranium's U.S. presence, Debra served as Sr. Director, Global Public Policy (Security & Privacy) at Visa where she oversaw a portfolio of issues, including data privacy, cybercrime, cybersecurity, product security, risk, authentication, IoT, blockchain, and payment risk. In this role, she represented Visa on the World Economic Forum’s Advancing Cyber Resilience Working Group, which published a toolkit for global boards of directors at the 2017 WEF Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Before her role at Visa, Debra held privacy and security leadership roles at IBM, American Express, TrustArc, IANS, The Advisory Board Company, and Farber Strategies. She has earned several designations, including the CISSP-ISSMP, CIPP/US, CIPP/E, CIPP/G, CIPT, and CIPM, and has been named a Fellow of Information Privacy by the IAPP. Debra holds a BA in English from Binghamton University and a JD from Brooklyn Law School. She’s currently completing her Executive Certificate of Business Excellence from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. When not working in her day job, Debra remains a life-long learner. She enjoys bing-watching sci-fi, reading about other cultures, researching etymology, educating others on privacy and security issues, and improving her budding web hacking skills.