Twitter Lawyer Displaced by Musk Takeover Lands at Ancestry.com

Tina Hwang, slated to be co-chief of Twitter Inc.’s legislation division right up until Elon Musk acquired the social media organization, has taken a work as vice president of legal and main privacy officer at Ancestry.com LLC.

Hwang succeeds Eric Heath, an legal professional who still left Ancestry final calendar year to just take the prime the privateness career at Placer Labs Inc., a serious estate facts and analytics startup.

She started March 13 and stories to basic counsel Gregory Packer, reported Katherine Wylie, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com.

Tina Hwang was component of a legal leadership succession system that Twitter’s then normal counsel, Sean Edgett, put in location just before Musk fired him on taking management of the enterprise very last Oct. Twitter then scrapped the strategy, and Hwang, a deputy general counsel for product and mental house, joined a slew of authorized leaders in leaving the San Francisco-centered organization.

In the previous several weeks, numerous of these former Twitter legal professionals have started off to secure new employment at other technological innovation companies and legislation companies.

Hwang, in advance of becoming a member of Twitter in mid-2021, used additional than four several years as an affiliate general counsel top the product or service lawful workforce at Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp. She also labored nearly a ten years at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, wherever she led a further products team dealing with e-commerce items.

Ancestry Function

At Ancestry.com, Hwang joins a crew of around a fifty percent-dozen legal professionals led by Packer, who was initially employed as vice president of legal in 2020.

Packer, a previous lawful chief at oil and fuel corporation Lonestar Means US Inc., was promoted to common counsel and company secretary in 2021.

Hwang’s new employer has confronted difficulties associated to privacy rights and info administration tactics. Bloomberg Businessweek discovered in a 2018 investigation that law enforcement applied DNA acquired from checks administered by affiliate marketers of Ancestry.com and its competition to address cold situations.

The Lehi, Utah-primarily based genealogy and technological innovation enterprise was sold for $4.7 billion in 2020 to Blackstone Inc.

23andMe Inc., a South San Francisco, Calif.-primarily based rival to Ancestry.com, went public in 2021. Final year its longtime main authorized and regulatory officer, Kathy Hibbs, took above the function of chief administrative officer. Jacqueline Cooke, a deputy normal counsel at 23andMe, is now typical counsel and privacy officer for the business, which has battled Ancestry.com in excess of logos.