Google's Alma Whitten to step down

Google faced criticism for enrolling millions in Buzz without warning

Google's first privacy director, Alma Whitten, is to step down after three years in the role.

It was created after mistakes on privacy including the company's Street View cars collecting personal data as they captured images of street scenes.

London-based Ms Whitten is being replaced in June by California-based Google software engineer Lawrence You.

The search giant said Ms Whitten had "done so much to improve our products and protect our users".

In a statement given to Forbes and other news sites, it said: "The privacy and security teams, and everyone else at Google, will continue this hard work to ensure that our users' data is kept safe and secure."

In 2010, Google fell foul of governments, privacy watchdogs and users when it emerged that Street View cars copied e-mails and passwords from private wi-fi networks.

In the same year, the launch of the Buzz social network tool caused similar problems because Google enrolled millions of people into it without their permission.

It also made lists of contacts and other details public.

In the wake of these mistakes - which led to multi-million dollar fines - the company appointed Ms Whitten to help ensure its software engineers took account of privacy as they developed new services and updated older ones.

Lawrence You, who has been at Google for eight years, was one of the first recruits to the privacy team Ms Whitten assembled.

When he takes over, he will manage a privacy and security team that numbers hundreds of workers.

Chris Soghoian, a technologist and policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Threatpost security blog that Mr You's main job would be "to keep the company out of privacy-related trouble" rather than to protect user privacy.

"There is no privacy ombudsman at Google," he added.

"Perhaps there should be."