John Grant joined Palantir Technologies in September 2010, where he founded the Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineering Team. Palantir builds data analytics software that is used by intelligence agencies, law enforcement organizations, research institutions, banks, aerospace engineering companies, insurance companies, famine relief NGOs, and hundreds of other organizations that are solving some of the world’s hardest problems today. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Team is a group of lawyers, engineers, and philosophers dedicated to ensuring that this powerful technology is built and deployed in ways that facilitate the use of data while respecting the fundamental rights of individuals. John is currently overseeing an internal ethics education program for Palantir engineers.
Previously, John served for nearly a decade as an advisor in the United States Senate. He began his career in the Senate as an aide to Senator Peter Fitzgerald before joining the staff of former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Republican leadership, Senator Lamar Alexander. While working for Senator Alexander on issues ranging from the federal budget to homeland security, John attended law school at Georgetown University. He earned his law degree shortly after joining the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As Counsel to Ranking Member Senator Susan Collins, John handled the Committee’s intelligence and privacy and civil liberties portfolios.
John is a co-author of The Architecture of Privacy (O’Reilly 2015) and most recently co-authored a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, “A Marketplace for Privacy: Incentives for Privacy Engineering and Innovation.” (Cambridge UP, 2018).
