Jane C. Horvath is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She is a Co-Chair of the firm’s Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Innovation Practice Group and a member of the Administrative Law and Regulatory, Artificial Intelligence, Crisis Management, Litigation, and Media, Entertainment, and Technology Practice Groups.
Ms. Horvath returned to Gibson Dunn after serving as Apple’s Chief Privacy Officer, where she led the company’s regulatory, policy, and product strategy on all privacy- and cybersecurity-related legal matters. In this role, Ms. Horvath shaped and implemented worldwide data protection laws, including in jurisdictions with omnibus privacy laws, such as the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan, as well as jurisdictions considering similar laws, such as the United States and Vietnam. She has extensive experience implementing encryption into different product applications and defending encryption against U.S. and global government access requests.
Before joining Apple, Ms. Horvath was Global Privacy Counsel at Google from 2007 to 2011. Ms. Horvath served as the U.S. Department of Justice’s first Chief Privacy Counsel and Civil Liberties Officer from 2006 to 2007 and, in that capacity, worked on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an executive agency established in the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. While at the DOJ, she was also a member of the High-Level Contact Group and leader of the U.S. delegation of experts tasked with exploring common ground between the European Union’s Third Pillar data protection principles and U.S. federal privacy laws.
From 1995 to 2001, Ms. Horvath was the General Counsel of Digital City Inc., an America Online, Inc. (AOL) subsidiary, and Assistant General Counsel to AOL, where she helped draft the company’s first privacy policies. Ms. Horvath started her legal career as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 1991. Ms. Horvath received her J.D. from the University of Virginia and her Bachelor of Science from the College of William and Mary.