Heather Burns is a renowned tech policy and regulation expert from Glasgow, Scotland. With a strong focus on digital regulations, Heather researches, writes, consults, and speaks extensively on topics that impact web development, especially privacy and data protection.
As part of the core privacy team at WordPress.org, Heather played a significant role in developing a suite of GDPR and privacy tools now used by over 30% of websites on the open web. She has also spearheaded efforts to create a cross-project open source privacy coalition, collaborating with privacy teams from platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Umbraco, Typo3, and others.
In this first part of our two-part interview, Heather shares her journey into the privacy space, her views on privacy, the evolution of privacy over the last year, and what it’s like being a privacy advocate in the open-source technology world.
Andy: Tell us about yourself – how did you end up in the privacy space?
Heather: It all started back in high school when I read a book about American consumer privacy. This was back before the web really took off in the 1990s. I learned things that shocked me, like how a photographer in a maternity ward could use your newborn’s first professional photo to put you on a dozen marketing lists while you were still recovering. That moment really hit me—the sheer entitlement people have to invade others’ privacy without permission. That was when the seed for privacy advocacy was planted in me.
I’ve always had a strong interest in human rights, which led me to study international politics at university. During that time, I also began building websites for clubs and friends’ projects, back in the days when we were coding raw HTML. It was the early days of the web, and it was an exciting time to have even a little knowledge of how things worked, especially when it meant you became the go-to person for running websites—something I ended up doing for many years.
I went on to work in international cultural diplomacy in Washington DC, but after a series of events, I found myself back in Scotland as a freelance web designer. Despite the change in direction, my interest in politics never faded. I found myself speaking at conferences about the impact of various laws on web designers and developers, especially around privacy issues. Over time, I realized that I was much more passionate about discussing policy than dealing with clients asking about sidebar colors.
So, I made the decision to leave web design behind and focus entirely on tech policy and regulation for digital businesses and policymakers. It feels like everything came full circle—from my early interest in human rights to my work on privacy and now advocating for privacy on the open web. In a way, I did become the human rights activist I set out to be when I was 15, just in a much different way and through a very different medium than I had imagined.
Stay tuned for the second part of our interview with Heather Burns, where we’ll explore more about her work on privacy in open-source software and the challenges she faces in this ever-evolving field.