While you probably have not heard of Jacqueline Hea, there’s a good chance you know her work. If you’ve ever looked up your home on Google Earth or have tried to find your way with Google Maps, Hea’s efforts have helped you do so.
That’s because Hea is a corporate counsel on the legal team at Google Geo responsible for licensing the images seen on Google Maps, a web mapping platform with more than 1 billion monthly users.
Essentially, Hea’s job is to ensure the licensing is in place for the images and data used by Google Maps, including the platform’s Street View service, which is compiled from images collected by Google or licensed from third-parties, such as satellite imagery providers.
Over the past decade, Google Maps has become the most used mapping service in the world, and with the increasing reliance on smartphones and technology, the service is making the days of unfolding crinkled paper maps a distant memory.
The team Hea works on also oversees Google Earth and handles the licensing agreements with businesses that may want to use its images or companies seeking to use its data, such as stores seeking to list locations on Maps.
Her path to Google nearly nine years ago may be unconventional compared to most corporate attorneys.
She received her bachelor’s of arts degree in Spanish with a minor in French from UAlbany in 1982, and while earning her degree, she studied overseas in Madrid, Spain, and Bogota, Colombia. At that time, Hea said, a career in law wasn’t the first thing on her mind.
“I think I was always kind of intrigued by law, but it wasn’t necessarily a goal first and foremost,” she said. “I don’t have any lawyers in my family or anything, so it was kind of more of an abstract idea.”
After Albany, Hea earned a degree in Latin American studies from Vanderbilt University and shortly after graduated from Tulane University Law School.
She spent about five years doing transactional law and some trust and estates work in Miami for law firm Kelley Drye & Warren, where she met some early role models in her career, such as Jose Sariego, a journalist turned-attorney who was then a partner at the firm.
However, when an opportunity to work in South America came her way, Hea couldn’t pass it up. In 1994, she joined Nortel Networks, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer, as a senior counsel focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. The role was based in Miami, but Hea, who speaks Spanish, Portuguese and French, would travel and stay in those regions for weeks at a time.
“So, that’s really kind of what took me to technology,” she said. “It was more of me trying to get back to an interest I had in languages and in Latin America.”
Throughout her 15 years with Nortel, Hea assisted the company with transactional work as it supplied equipment to help build Brazil’s wireless communication networks. Wireless subscribers in Brazil grew from 4 million in 1995 to 30 million by 1999, Martha Bejar, Nortel’s regional president of the Latin American and Caribbean division, told The New York Times in 2000.
Nortel, Hea said, was the second-largest supplier of wireless network equipment in the region at the time, behind Ericsson.
The work helped her understand “what a difference a wireless network could make for a society in terms of communication,” she said.
“It was a big leap forward because, previously, you were reliant on landlines and the ability to roll out a landline network, which is infrastructure — digging and all that — and is much more complicated,” she said.
In 2009, Nortel went bankrupt and was purchased by Ericsson. Hea worked at the company for about four years as senior counsel before joining Google — by “happenstance,” she said. Ericsson sent her to California to do venture capital, which opened her eyes to Silicon Valley and she decided to apply to Google, she said.
Her decades-long career in technology has mostly centered around connecting people, from working on the development of wireless networks to playing a vital role with Google Maps.
Hea knows that all technology “can have both positive and negative outcomes,” and regulating those outcomes is “a complex task for society,” she said.
“But to make information available is helpful,” she added. “Reducing our dependence on paper maps and having information at your fingertips certainly has, I think, a big impact.”
