Jason Hirsch left Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr for Meta—then Facebook—about six months after The Guardian and The New York Times broke the Cambridge Analytica story in April 2018. The scandal that ensued outlined how millions of Facebook users’ data was misused without consent.

In addition to costing Meta more than $5 billion in settlements with the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission, the affair increased scrutiny of Big Tech and brought questions from regulators across the world about what companies like Meta were doing with user data. Artificial intelligence, heavily employed by Meta to populate users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds, added another wrinkle of complication and regulatory scrutiny.