Privacy Beyond the Headlines
Data privacy is often framed as a problem of scary headlines and legal risk. Heather Burns's new book, Understanding Privacy, takes a different angle: it is an introduction to the beliefs, concepts, and ideas that inform privacy as it exists — or has failed to exist — on the open web. The book covers roughly 350 pages and positions privacy as a set of fundamental values that precede its role as a legal compliance issue.
Burns draws on experience across human rights, law, policy, and web development to explain these principles in practical terms. The goal is not to show you how to code, but to help you make the right decisions that inform code. A healthy approach to user privacy gives you the foundation to question — and even challenge — workplace practices that may not be in your users' best interests.
This is explicitly not a legal reference manual. The book aims to shift readers from a negative view of privacy as a scary compliance obligation toward a positive view of privacy as an opportunity to build a better web.
What You'll Learn
- Fundamental concepts, definitions, and frameworks behind privacy and data protection.
- How to integrate a healthy approach to user privacy into everything you do.
- Common privacy issues and how you can make a difference.
- How to lay the groundwork for future developers, designers, and project managers.
- The obligations we have to safeguard user privacy and health data.
Who It's For
Understanding Privacy targets designers, developers, and project managers who want to understand what privacy really is and how to integrate a healthy approach into their daily work.
Chapter Breakdown
The book is organized into four sections plus a postscript:
- Privacy and You — reviews the fundamental concepts, definitions, and frameworks behind privacy and data protection.
- Privacy and Your Work — discusses how to integrate a healthy approach to user privacy into everything you do, whether you are a designer, developer, or project manager.
- Privacy and Your Users — covers issues around user privacy where you can make a difference.
- Privacy and Your Future — suggests critical areas that make the web a better place and lay the ground for future practitioners.
- Postscript: Privacy and Health Data — addresses the pressing obligations we have to safeguard user privacy and health data.
The ebook is available for download in October 2022; printed books ship in early December 2022. Written by Heather Burns with cover design by Espen Brunborg.
