Legal Counsel, Privacy

The Legal Counsel II, Privacy & Data Protection will provide practical, business-oriented legal advice on U.S. and global privacy matters across Nielsen’s products, services, commercial relationships, and internal operations. This role will support the development and operation of Nielsen’s privacy program and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Information Security, Procurement, Sales, Marketing, and other business teams.

• Advise on privacy compliance, data governance, and risk mitigation for business operations, products, data partnerships, and commercial transactions.

• Apply expanded knowledge and experience in privacy and data protection law while continuing to develop higher-level expertise.

• Solve a range of privacy and commercial legal problems using sound judgment, established frameworks, and practical business analysis.

• Draft, review and negotiate complex data protection exhibits on both the buy-side and sell-side.

• Receive moderate guidance and direction while taking ownership of assigned matters and workstreams.

Responsibilities

• Provide day-to-day legal guidance on U.S. federal and state privacy laws, including the CCPA/CPRA and the evolving patchwork of comprehensive state privacy statutes, as well as applicable sectoral, consumer protection, marketing, and data security requirements.

• Maintain an in-depth working knowledge of U.S. state privacy regulations and translate legal developments into clear, actionable guidance, contract language, policies, notices, processes, and implementation requirements.

• Draft, review, and negotiate data processing agreements (DPAs), data protection and security terms, data use and sharing agreements, and related privacy provisions in commercial contracts, representing Nielsen both as a data buyer/customer and as a data seller, provider, or service provider.

• Conduct and support privacy impact assessments (PIAs/DPIAs) for products, features, data uses, partnerships, and other initiatives; identify risks, recommend mitigations, and help embed privacy by design and by default.

• Conduct privacy due diligence on third parties, vendors, customers, and strategic partners, including reviewing questionnaires and security materials, assessing processing activities and data flows, identifying gaps, negotiating remediation, and supporting ongoing oversight.

• Advise on advertising technology, audience measurement, analytics, identity, cookies, pixels, SDKs, targeted advertising, consent and preference management, data monetization, and related media and marketing data practices. Experience in adtech is strongly preferred.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Information Security, Procurement, Sales, Marketing, and other stakeholders to assess proposed data collection, use, disclosure, retention, and deletion activities and to support compliant launches and operational changes.

• Support privacy incident and data breach response, consumer and data subject rights escalations, regulatory inquiries, audits, and other privacy compliance matters in coordination with relevant internal teams and outside counsel.

• Contribute to privacy program materials, including policies, procedures, playbooks, templates, training, records of processing, data inventories, and compliance reporting.

• Monitor changes in privacy and data protection laws and enforcement trends, assess their impact on Nielsen’s business, and communicate concise recommendations to stakeholders.

• Manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, global environment and provide clear, timely, and pragmatic advice to both legal and non-legal audiences.

Role-Level Expectations

• Understands key business drivers and uses this understanding to accomplish assigned work.

• Solves standard and moderately complex problems by analyzing possible solutions using experience, judgment, and precedent.

• Has no supervisory responsibilities but may provide guidance to new associates or colleagues.

• Explains privacy and legal information to others in straightforward and actionable terms.

• Requires expanded conceptual knowledge in privacy and data protection while developing additional skill sets.

• Impacts the quality of own work and the work of the team while operating within applicable guidelines and policies.

Department: Legal & Compliance
Function: Legal
Experience Level: Not Applicable