Understanding Privacy

Privacy is a scary topic? It doesn’t have to be. Our new book Understanding Privacy helps you understand what data privacy is really about beyond scary headlines. 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 that we build. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or project manager, this book will equip you with the knowledge you need to put your users first in everything you do and build a better web for tomorrow.

Understanding Privacy is about all the fundamental values of privacy as a concept, which precede privacy as a legal compliance issue. It’s about the ways these concepts impact your work as a designer, a developer, or a project manager. And it’s about the ways you can adopt these principles to create a healthy, user-centric approach to privacy in everything you do.

Heather explains what she has experienced working on privacy from every angle — human rights, law, policy, and web development — in the simplest way possible, and in the most positive way possible, in ways you can comprehend, use, and adapt in your work on the web right away.

What is discussed in this book is applicable to any programming language, software community, or project workflow. For that reason, you won’t find any code samples in this book. A healthy approach to user privacy, after all, doesn’t tell you howto code. It tells you how to make the right decisions which inform the code. It also gives you the foundation you need to question, and even challenge, workplace practices which might not be in your users’ best interests.

This book is not a legal reference manual. While it will briefly cover the major privacy regulations and proposals in context, it helps you understand the common values which inform nearly all user-centric privacy regulations, and to apply them regardless of the presence or absence of a legal framework.

By the end of this book, you will have shifted your understanding from a negative view of privacy as a scary legal compliance obligation to a positive view of privacy as an opportunity to build a better web.