Robert B. Yonaitis
In the Khumbu. Click the photo for full size.
Robert “Rob” Yonaitis, JD, is a research scientist, award-winning technologist, author, private pilot, and artist working in oil and charcoal. The professional thread is privacy and security together — not one without the other. He builds systems people can trust and reads the law those systems have to live inside. A Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from ALU School of Law sits beside a life in software, the cockpit, and the studio. The questions do not change: what you collect, where it lives, who may see it, and what happens when the rules — or the weather — shift.
A legacy of innovation and leadership
The path started in product. As founder, CEO, CTO, and Chairman of HiSoftware, Inc., Rob built a company around digital inclusion, privacy, and cybersecurity — tools meant to protect data at rest, in motion, and in use. Cryptzone acquired HiSoftware in 2014. At AvePoint he served as Chief Research Scientist and architect of the data protection and compliance suite, pushing a risk-based design that analysts later recognized in data-centric audit, DLP, and GRC.
That same mix of architecture and governance followed him into larger rooms. In Shenzhen he worked as a privacy protection solution architect for Huawei. At State Street Bank in Burlington he designed privacy and governance strategies for sensitive financial data. At the International Monetary Fund he served as Technical Privacy Manager, standing up privacy programs and data governance for a global institution. He now advises organizations worldwide as an independent consultant in privacy and cybersecurity — still the same question, at every scale: can you explain what you hold, and can you defend it?
Community and education
The products were never only commercial. HiSoftware’s “Cynthia Says” gave organizations a way to test for digital inclusion. At AvePoint, Compliance Detector was built to make regulatory adherence visible instead of assumed. A Microsoft-funded open-source kit put accessible collaboration portals into SharePoint so more people could actually use the systems they were given.
Rob wrote Understanding Accessibility, later adopted by U.S. federal agencies for training and compliance. In 2014 he led development of a Privacy Impact Assessment system distributed by the International Association of Privacy Professionals — a working instrument, not a white paper, for teams that had to finish the assessment instead of talking about it.
Awards and recognition
In 2002 the Da Vinci Award recognized electronics and IT work that improved the lives of people with disabilities. Earlier, the Computer Smithsonian Award cited the Massachusetts Department of Revenue’s 1997 Tax Season Network. Gartner and Hypatia later placed the product work in the conversation on data-centric audit and protection, data loss prevention, and governance, risk, and compliance. The thread through all of it is the same: make the system usable, then make it accountable.
Standards and advocacy
Rob spent two years on the IAPP Training Advisory Board. He has been a delegate to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum since 2010. At the World Wide Web Consortium he contributed to working groups on digital inclusion, evaluation and reporting, and browser security indicators. He is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery. The point of the rooms was never the badge. It was to put inclusion and security into the specs before the product shipped.
How the work was built
The JD sits on top of a long technical spine: a B.S. in Computer Science from Franklin Pierce College, a Master of Aeronautical Science — aeronautics and space studies — from Embry-Riddle, and a graduate certificate in instructional systems design from the same university. MIT executive programs in artificial intelligence and in big data followed in 2018, when the tools started to outrun the policy.
The professional stack is the one the work requires: CISSP; IAPP credentials as CIPT, CIPM, CIPP/US, CIPP/EU, and Fellow of Information Privacy. Law school did not replace engineering. It gave the engineering a second language — duty, jurisdiction, and the difference between a control that looks good on a slide and one that survives a review.
A vision for the future
The work ahead is the same work, closer to the person who has to live with the result: privacy, cybersecurity, and digital inclusion through mentorship, open-source tools, and software that stays under the owner’s control. That is the idea behind Data Protection Operations and DPO Ready Center. It is also the habit from the mountain and the field. Prepare. Know what you have. Take the next honest step.