About

Yvonne Cunnane acts as the main privacy advisor to the Facebook business in Europe and leads a growing team of data protection and privacy lawyers. Under her guidance, the data protection legal team planned and guided the business on a significantly large GDPR compliance programme. Alongside her extensive work on the general compliance side, Cunnane is a key advisor to the business on the privacy aspects of product development. In the words of a nominator, ‘she works with her team to ensure that Facebook’s products are developed with data protection principles in mind from their inception. This work means that Yvonne is at the cutting edge of developments in the privacy space, and she frequently works with data protection authorities (both in Europe and globally) and other stakeholders to help establish industry norms’. As Facebook is constantly in the public eye regarding its data protection systems and compliance, this role is highly important within the global company, particularly as it covers the company’s activities across Europe. A nominator highlights that, Cunnane ‘is an incredibly respected voice in the privacy space. She is a highly sought after commentator and a frequent speaker at privacy conferences. [She] is a thoughtful mentor to her colleagues and widely praised for her incisive legal mind. Her ability to cut through extraneous detail means that she takes a pragmatic approach to knotty legal challenges’.