John Buckley is Google's Lead Policy Strategist for Child Safety. They have been working in the area of child or youth safety and wellness for over 13 years. John's background is in sociology, social work, criminology and public health. They worked in Irish NGOs for a number of years, providing direct support to children and young people, who were at times in crisis (ISPCC, Childline and SpunOut,ie), where they won a European Youth Award, was appointed to the National Youth Work Advisory Group and helped to coordinate a “yes” vote in the Children's Right Referendum in Ireland.

John has spent the last 8 years working a variety of roles at Meta, YouTube and Google, all based around sexual abuse and exploitation. During that time John has led innovative work such as: launching the use of hashmatching for NCEI for Meta, publishing research on the intent of CSAM posessors, standing up YouTube's livestream enforcement response process, launching Facebook and Instagram search CSAM deterrence and managing a range of complex CSAM investigations and intel programs. John was also co-chair of the Tech Coalition’s innovation working group under Project Protect.

They now lead Google's Child Safety product policy team where in the last year they have been focused on building policy response to: child sexual abuse instructions, generative AI and contextual CSAM review.