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Google seeks UK privacy lobbyist

Large Californian, 12, WLTM flexible London lawyer

Are you a privacy lawyer? Would you take pride in working for a company with "a real soul"? Is your brain impervious to cognitive dissonance? Could you grow a brass neck?

If you answered "yes!" to all of the above questions then Google has the job for you.

"Google's innovative services raise challenging legal questions that demand creative and practical answers," understatedly explains the firm, announcing its search for a UK Privacy Counsel.

The high profile role, which signals the rise of online privacy issues on the domestic and EU policy agendas, will involve both supervising internal practices and assuring the outside world all is well.

Not only will you "collaborate with other Google lawyers and product teams to evaluate our products, applications, services and data systems and to develop best practices to collect, use, handle and secure data."

But also "you'll team with Corporate Communications in the crafting of public messaging regarding our practices, and you'll work with our Public Policy teams as we engage in the active public policy debate relating to privacy."

Applicants can expect a thorough probing by the firm's famously weird recruitment process, which typically involves endless robotic testing before being allowed to discuss working for Google with a human. The successful candidate can then look forward to working on privacy problems such as complaints over Google Buzz, the regulatory and criminal investigations into Street View's Wi-Fi interception operation and the implications of location-based services on Android phones.

If that's not challenging enough, you'll also be "advising senior executives on the latest trends and developments in the field". These are the same senior executives whose leader Eric Schmidt says "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place".

Google UK's new lawyer will also presumably be working with Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based global Privacy Counsel. He's a man who knows the perils of taking on the privacy brief at the world's dominant web firm: he's a wanted criminal in Italy as a result. ®

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