Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy through Careful Design

We are tethered to our devices all day, every day, leaving data trails of our searches, posts, clicks, and communications. Meanwhile, governments and businesses collect our data and use it to monitor us without our knowledge. So we have resigned ourselves to the belief that privacy is hard–choosing to believe that websites do not share our information, for example, and declaring that we have nothing to hide anyway. In this informative and illuminating book, a computer privacy and security expert argues that privacy is not that hard if we build it into the design of systems from the start.

Along the way, Jaap-Henk Hoepman debunks eight persistent myths surrounding computer privacy. The website that claims it doesn”t collect personal data, for example; Hoepman explains that most data is personal, capturing location,